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BALORING 0" 


RK’S ART GALLERIES 


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ALFONSO D’ESTE. TITIAN 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


EXPLORING 
NEW YORK’S ART 
GALLERIES 


BY 
MARGARET BREUNING 


ILLUSTRATED 


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NEW YORK 
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 
MCMXXVIII 


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A PREFATORY NOTE 


As the title of this book indicates, it is written to 
serve as a guide to the paintings of the public collec- 
tions in New York City for any one who has not 
already found his way to these treasures. In blazing 
this trail a certain number of fingerposts have been 
erected to indicate who is who and what his place is 
in the world of art. This generalized biographical 
and historical comment does not profess to be an 
exhaustive survey of the collections or a critical esti- 
mate of their painters. Any such serious appraisal 
short of a history of art would be impossible. 
Rather, it is hoped that the reader will embark on his 
own voyage of discovery and find that the landmarks 
given here in different epochs of artistic development 
will serve as good points of departure for many 
felicitous journeys of his own. 

M. B. 


CONTENTS 


Part One: THE METROPOLITAN 
MUSEUM OF ART 


CHAPTER PAGE 
A Great Titian . ; ie ak ie ig ae 
Seeeite Marquand Gallery . ..  . . 22 
III Early Italian Paintings Sey ee Pes oe ne Se 
merece italian Painting; 0,0 ms i ae 5S 
Seerewmertherm schools. .,. in is 65 
Meeeonanin fainting .° 4, st wR 
SMMC eine 2 ks twee ce DS 
SU eCRPP AMIN 6 ke CEI 
Meeeeamcenaneous Paintings ..  . «+. 139 
Mmeeeierican Painting . 9 1 ns om «. 15! 
eeeeran Collection 5. wo «6. ZO 
Part Two: OTHER NOTABLE 
COLLECTIONS 
XII Hispanic Museum 5 Pa Ue sees rae aes 18, 
The Barnard Cloisters . ! ‘ ay a0? 
Seeueriroomyn Museum  .; - : we i 209 
XIV Various Collections. ae 20 
The New York Public Linea d ‘i, 220 
_ New York Historical Society a ee P| 
The City Hall . o ake 


The Art Galleries and Their Postion: Ee 243 


vil 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


ALFONSO D'ESTE. Titian. .. in. Frontispiece 
FACING PAGE 


JAMES STUART, DUKE OF LENNOX. Anthony van 
Dyck : : ee ; : 


MARS AND VENUS UNITED BY LOVE. Paolo Veronese 
THE NATIVITY. Fra Angelico : : : Y 
PARADISE. Giovanni di Paolo 


MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS. Gurolamo dat 
Libri : ; . i : : , 3 


THE ANNUNCIATION. Roger van der Weyden ; 
THE HARVESTERS. Pieter Bruegel the Elder . 


YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER JUG. Johannes Ver- 
meer ; ‘ PIES Tb ye nara aaa 


i 
THE NATIVITY. £1 Greco : : 


HON. HENRY FANE WITH HIS GUARDIANS, INIGO 
JONES AND CHARLES BLAIR. Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds { , F : : A : : 


THE CALMADY CHILDREN. Sir Thomas Lawrence .., 
BOY WITH AswoRD. Edouard Manet . f 
MRS. SYLVANUS BOURNE. John Singleton Copley 
NORTHEASTER. Wainslow Homer 

MADAME xX. John S. Sargent .., 


ARRANGEMENT IN FLESH COLOR AND BLACK— 
THEODORE DURET. James A. McNeill Whistler 
ix 


26 
30 
42 
44, 


58 


70 
78 


86 
94 


100 
104 
126 


142 


152 
158 


166 


xX 


THE THINKER. 


SANTO DOMINGO DE GUZMAN, 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


Thomas Eakins 


El Greco ; 


VALENCIA. Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida .  . 


THE SHELL HEAPS, FLORIDA. 


Winslow Homer 


THE SAND CART. George Bellows . 


PORTRAIT OF CHARLES W. PEALE. Benjamin West 


VIRGIN AND CHILD. Recently attributed to Nardo di 


Cidne 


ei 


°, 


FACING PAGE 


174 
198 
206 
210 
214 
230 


238 


EXPLORING NEW YORK’S 
ART GALLERIES 


Part One: THE METROPOLITAN 
MUSEUM OF ART 


CHAPTER ONE 


A GREAT TITIAN 


VISIT to the Metropolitan Museum of Art 

is frequently anticipated with apprehension. 
The entrance hall is far from reassuring in its pala- 
tial vastness; its flight of marble steps and enormous 
vistas of wings seem to sound a note of austerity and 
formality that are out of key for an informal ven- 
ture. Moreover, the Metropolitan contains such an 
amazing range of art objects, that after a little 
wandering on hard floors, many visitors become dis- 
couraged on finding themselves marooned, as it were, 
in the Oriental exhibits or possibly among antique 
casts or endless cases of small, wholly unknown and 
unappreciated exhibits. Museum docents are not 
always available while catalogues frequently prove 
perplexing. 

Yet every visitor, even with limited time or 
strength at his disposal, may make voyages of dis- 
covery for himself, and becoming assured of the ease 

3 13 


14 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


with which treasures are unearthed single-handed 
may pursue his own uncharted course hither and 
thither among the delights that are spread out for 
his delectation. One cannot be argus-eyed and look 
in every direction at once, but should resolutely fol- 
low a definite goal. One fine work of art viewed 
with leisure, appreciation and some comprehension 
of its history and significance bulks large in the 
memory, while scattered impressions of casually 
viewed objects glimpsed at random soon fade into 
a confused mélange. 

One could make no better commencement of such 
a self-conducted pilgrimage than to visit the Mar- 
quand Gallery to see the portrait of Alfonso d’ Este, 
of Ferrara, painted by Titian probably about 1523. 
Added to the thrill of beholding this superb work 
there is a piquancy of mystery and romance, for it 
was a lost portrait, now almost miraculously recov- 
ered, and in its early history was known to have been 
bartered by the Duke, its sitter, for political protec- 
tion from the Emperor Charles V. The Duke, like 
most princes of the Renaissance, was a connoisseur of 
art and especially appreciated the work of Titian. 
The great painter was frequently at the court of 
Ferrara and pointed out this portrait of his patron 
as his best work to the Emperor. ‘That, too, when 
there was at Ferrara that famous “cabinet” of his 
paintings which are now scattered among European 
museums. The best known of these, possibly, is the 
“Bacchus and Ariadne” of the London National 
Gallery. 


A GREAT TITIAN 15 


When Charles was crowned Emperor of the Holy 
Roman Empire, and entered into an alliance with 
Pope Clement VII, he became feudal overlord and 
arbiter of the little cities, duchies, Papal States 
and tangled entities of the body politic of North 
Italy. While the Dukes of Este were powerful, 
they were also in a precarious position as Ferrara, 
their ducal city and seat, was exposed to the ravages 
of all the wars that might blaze out from the ever- 
smouldering embers of jealousy and enmity. 

Consequently despite marvelous fortifications and 
the military genius of the Duke, a little protection 
was appreciated. Politics were politics then as now 
and a price had to be paid for immunity, but it was a 
costly affair in this case, for Alfonso had to part 
with his much-cherished portrait. The Imperial 
Secretary kindly looked over Alfonso’s choice col- 
lection and concluded that whatever was omitted 
from the gift to his master the painting of the 
Duke should be included. Many diplomatic meas- 
ures were taken to shake the secretary’s decision, but 
it was useless. He was quite as decided on having 
the portrait as Alfonso was on keeping it. Not 
only had Titian declared it to be the best work that 
he had executed for the Duke, but no less a connois- 
seur and austere critic than Michael Angelo had 
greatly commended it. It is not strange that it cost 
_ Alfonso a bitter pang to surrender the portrait. But 
_ the Imperial Secretary was insistent and the Duke 
had to yield. Gracefully, one feels sure on viewing 
_ the portrait. There must have been great pomp and 


- « 


16 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


elegance about even a slight gesture of this mag- 
nificent noble. Moreover, Alfonso had early learned — 
the necessity of paying for things with uncommon 
currency. His father, Duke Ercole I, had married 
him to the too well-known Lucrezia Borgia in order 
to strengthen the house politically. Lucrezia was 
both young and beautiful, but a little too adept at 
ridding herself of undesirable husbands to make her 
a pleasant match for any young man not sure of 
meeting her fancy. 

The last Italian documentary ac of the por- 
trait refers to it as hanging in the Emperor’s room 
in Bologna in 1533. Afterwards, according to other 
accounts, it was carried to Spain by the Emperor, 
where, in the latter part of the seventeenth century 
it appears to be listed in inventories of the castle at 
Madrid. From that time it disappears completely. 
The general supposition as to its fate was that it was 
destroyed by fire when the castle burned in the eight- 
eenth century. Then more than a year ago there 
was a report that it had been bought as an unknown 
' work from a French chateau near Dijon. Conjec- 
ture alone can account for its reaching France. It 
may easily have been one of the spoils of Spain 
brought in during the Napoleonic Wars, but there is 
no certainty or knowledge of its history. All so- 
called attributions of ownership and identity are con- 
sequently missing. It is a picture without a pedigree, 
a fact which enabled the museum to obtain it for a 
sum enormously less than if it had been a painting 
by Titian which bore all the ascriptions of various 


A GREAT TITIAN i 


ownerships and provenance that make the genealog- 
ical tree of a painting. 

This portrait needs no attributions to establish it- 
self as a masterpiece. Since all the internal evi- 
dence in the character of the painting and design 
point to Titian, one may be content to accept the 
judgment of Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Fine Arts 
of the Museum, and rejoice that after years of hid- 
ing, this noble work has come into the light of day 
to delight us. It is interesting to note in connection 
with its purchase that the museum announces that 
“when sufficient income for the purpose shall have 
been received from the estate of the late Frank A. 
Munsey, it is the intention of the Trustees of the 
Museum to assign the portrait to his bequest ‘as a 
worthy first purchase from that benefaction, without 
which they would have hardly felt at liberty to buy 
this important picture.’ ” 

When you actually stand before this portrait you 
will probably be unmindful of anything but its serene 
beauty and power. It shows this Duke of Este in a 
rich panoply of furred garments, velvets and gold 
brocade. Jewels hold the slashings of the ample 
sleeves and a sapphire and pearl hang from a chain 
on his breast. The whole character of the man is in 
the painting of the hands, the one so negligently and 
gracefully laid upon the bronze cannon, with such 
space and atmosphere between the outspread thumb 
and the hint of lace ruffle coming out of the gold- 
tissued sleeve. Here is the hand of the dilettante 
and connoisseur, just as the thrust of the other hand 


18 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


about the sword hilt reveals the power and vigor 
of his vital nature. It is a double echo of the crafty 
suggestion of the handsome face with its smooth 
mask of urbanity and its flashing eyes of almost con- 
temptuous pride. The face would, indeed, be hard, 
were it not for the beautiful painting of the hair that 
frames it and the silky beard, under which you sense 
the thrust of the resolute chin. 

It is probable that this prince of Este was about 
forty-seven years old at the time of the painting of 
this portrait. The violent, turbulent life of a great 
noble at this period has left its mark upon his fea- 
tures. The puffy folds about the eyes and the swol- 
len lids, the sagging of the face from the cheek 
bones, the sharpening of the aquiline nose, all 
emphasize that powerful and wealthy as he was, the 
cannon and sword were meet symbols to be included 
in his portraiture and that his gorgeous robes of cere- 
mony were but for the pageantry of his life of which 
tumult and strife were the background. 

Such a portrait is more than a powerful present- 
ment of an individual: it is also an epitome of the 
splendor of the Late Renaissance and those curiously 
contradictory elements that went into the web of its 
glittering tissue—frank sensuousness, refinement of 
esthetic sensibility, graciousness of elegant bearing 
and courtly manners, rapacity, the indifference of 
callous cruelty, passionate, pagan joy in living, and 
a delight in everything that contributes to making an 
art of existence and a pageant of life. It is all here 
in this canvas, so broadly handled and yet so subtly 


A GREAT TITIAN 19 


and so marvelously invested with the actual sub- 
stance of this flesh and jewels, velvets and glowing 
stuffs. This is not realism; it is more than that, for 
it is not only the outward surfaces and textures, how- 
ever finely they are rendered, that we are made to 
feel in this vigorous portrait—it is the very essence, 
the substance of the things painted. 

It is interesting to know that the Duke was not 
content to be despoiled of his treasure. He does 
not have the bearing of a patient man. Later he 
had a second portrait executed by Titian, in which 
the pendent jewel of this portrait is replaced by the 
Order of St. Michael. A copy of this second por- 
trait is now in the Pitti Palace. Also, it appears 
highly improbable that this nobleman suffered many 
such despoilments, for his ceremonial placidity of 
sitter does not counterbalance the smoldering feroc- 
ity and intensity of his nature. One does not wonder 
on beholding him that Lucrezia Borgia, when she 
became his wife, found it quite expedient to give up 
her little laboratory experiments in poisons and 
settle down to the tamer duties of a Duchess. The 
portrait is the effulgence of a magnificent period, 
seized and preserved for us by an artist who was one 
of the glories of this very epoch and knew how to 
penetrate its secret character as well as give glorious 
presentment of its pomp and splendor. 

This artist, Tiziano Vecellio, or Titian, is himself 
a great and magnificent personage, the companion 
of his patrons whether prince, king, emperor or 
church dignitary. He was an artist of universal gifts 


20 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


and majestic powers and in many ways summed up 
the Renaissance in his work. He was born of an old 
family and at ten or eleven years of age showed such 
unmistakable talent that he was sent to Venice to 
study under the great masters of his day, the two 
Bellinis, Gentile and Giovanni, and later under 
Giorgione. From the first his ability was recognized. 
He executed commissions for the Doges and Council 
of Venice, he visited the Dukes of Ferrara and Man- 
tua and put his genius at their command. He lived 
in Biri, a suburb of Venice in great luxury and ele- 
gance, receiving the world courteously and enter- 
taining in a truly royal fashion. The garrulous 
chronicler Vasari visited him there and comments on 
the splendor of his household and the charm of its 
host. 

There is a slight undercurrent of contemporary 
gossip about Titian’s love of gold. But it must have 
taken a great deal to keep up such an establishment 
as his and it is well known that dukes and emperors 
were slow in payments. Philip IV paid up some of 
his father’s debts to the artist, but did not show him- 
self so scrupulous about his own. Moreover, when 
your long score is against a prince who has a fine 
assortment of dungeons and plenty of men-at-arms 
the demand for services. rendered must be made in a 
propitiatory tone rather than a peremptory one. 

The artist lived to far past ninety and was carried 
off then by a visitation of the plague. An artist of 
great gifts and remarkable scope, there is no need to 
consider his work or its character here save to recall 


A GREAT TITIAN 21 


the fact that his portraiture is the forerunner and 
example of all the great portraiture that followed, 
so that we may well look at the endowment of life 
and vitality that he has given to this haughty Italian 
duke, the seizure of the man in the fulness of his 
power and arrogance with such felicity of composi- 
tion, ease of pose and gorgeous depth of color, and 
realize how much later portrait painters owed to his 
serene and superb genius, 


CHAPTER TWO 


THE MARQUAND GALLERY 


HE Duke of Este, however magnificent, finds 
himself among his peers, as it were, since the 
Marquand Gallery contains some remarkable por- 
traits by masters of portraiture, as well as a collection 
of other important canvases of widely varying peri- 
ods and types. For this gallery is a sort of hall of 
honor, named, as the legend on the middle wall 
runs, “to commemorate the great services and gifts 
of Henry G. Marquand.” Mr. Marquand was one 
of the founders of the museum, its second president 
and one of its great benefactors. His portrait by 
John Singer Sargent hangs at the right as you enter 
from the main stairway. This portrait is a striking 
epitome of an intellectual, cultured individual. It is 
carried out with great facility, but also with breadth 
and repose. The sitter, turned in his chair with one 
long, thin hand flung out and the other supporting 
his head, is revealed as a nervous, energetic man 
beneath the outward composure of his reserve. It 
is remarkable how bodily gesture is made to accent 
the sensibility and endowments of the sitter, and the 
impression of mental activity outrunning lagging 
physical strength. 
Frans Hals, one of the great masters of portrait 


painting, is represented here by three canvases, two 
22 


THE MARQUAND GALLERY 23 


of them—“Portrait of a Woman” and “Portrait of 
a Man”—gifts of Mr. Marquand. Frans Hals was 
so superb a craftsman that, even if there are to be no 
technical considerations in this rapid adventuring 
among pictures, one must realize a little how this 
gifted artist achieved his almost miraculous results. 
He was a Dutch painter, living and working in 
Haarlem, and for a time was a fashionable and much 
sought out artist; later he lost prestige and fortune 
and died a pauper. No one knows about his training 
or his teachers, for he comes to our knowledge only 
when he has perfected his craft and is a full-fledged 
master of the art of portraiture. 

Portrait painting was already popular in seven- 
teenth-century Holland when Hals appears in it. 
With the yoke of Spanish oppression finally re- 
moved from this sturdy little nation, a new era of 
prosperity and expansion set in and the peaceful arts 
flourished. What more natural than that the wealthy 
burgher should want his position and the continuity 
of his family marked by a portrait? Or what more 
natural, in an ultra-Protestant country where altar- 
pieces or religious subjects were not in demand, nor 
any grand style of mural decoration sought for 
princely palaces, than that painters should turn 
gladly to this form of figure painting? 

It was the sober realistic art of a sturdy, staid 
people, who wanted to have things represented as 
they were in a neat, tidy fashion. The slow, delib- 
erate building up of form that Hals found in prac- 
tice by contemporary Dutch portrait painters often 


94 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


resulted in labored, formal work from which life 
had vanished in the elaborate process of its construc- 
tion. Hals painted directly and rapidly, giving 
to his canvases somewhat the character of a vivid 
sketch, with his decisive, crisp touches and bold 
brushwork. Yet for all his liveliness and summary 
procedure he was so accurate, in his laying in of 
light and color, of form and values, that in his best 
work there is the same completeness of rendering as 
in the laborious portraits of the conventional portrait 
painters of his day with an added endowment of 
miraculous life and vigor. In his late work he car- 
ried his swiftness of execution and trenchant han- 
dling still further, modifying his palette to blacks 
and whites to enable him to work even more rapidly, 
while his simplification of form became a marvelous 
technique of shorthand conveying brilliant impres- 
sions with the greatest economy of means. But 
always the accuracy and precision of the painter’s eye 
and hand, his knowledge and taste, must be reckoned 
with, as also his power to seize the essentials of his 
subjects and sum them up in a splendid ensemble. 

In this “‘Portrait of a Woman” you cannot fail to 
see what precision there is in the direct handling of 
the big brush, what exquisite rendering of the tex- 
tures in the white lace collar and cuffs, the rich stuffs 
of the dress and the pink petticoat beneath. But the 
seizing of personality is most amazing: the placid, 
self-reliant woman with her humorous, curious eager- 
ness piercing her formal pose. In her you are made 
to see how the stability and intensity of a people that 


THE MARQUAND GALLERY 25 


so long had struggled for political and religious 
freedom is modified a little by security and pros- 
perity into serenity and content. This is more than 
the portrait of an individual; it is the portrait of 
a race and of a period, of a psychological moment 
held for all time in this beautiful gradation of light 
and even texture of surface. 

The Portrait of a Man” (H-16-8), by Hals 
represents the subject partly turned to the spectator, 
one hand on his hip and the other holding a glove. 
It is characteristic of the later period of the painter’s 
work, in its powerful modeling and restricted palette, 
its vigorous handling and full brush strokes. In 
fact, it is almost a monochrome of blacks and whites 
that melt occasionally into gray, giving a sobriety 
and dignity to the canvas. It is a trenchant, vivid 
portrait, direct, completely envisaged by its painter 
and rendered with such force and virility in its crafts- 
manship that at first it does not occur to the beholder 
to inquire by what subtleties and science this great 
work was accomplished. 

Rembrandt is represented in this gallery by two 
portraits. That of “Hendrickje Stoffels” is in the 
manner associated with much of his portraiture. 
This faithful member of the painter’s household is 
shown life size, slightly leaning forward in a fa- 
tigued posture—a fur cloak falling from her arm, 
pearls and a richness of costume. Poor Hendrickje, 
one would like to believe that even for a fleeting mo- 
ment this grandeur was hers and not simply studio 
properties. However, more of her, and of Rem- 


26 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


brandt too, when the group of the Altman collection 
is reached. Here it is enough to note that this por- 
trait with its figure emerging from an amber radi- 
ance of enveloping atmosphere, its heaped up rough- 
ness of broken pigment and its monochrome of 
browns, is in direct contrast to the “Portrait of a 
Man” on the other wall. This latter painting, with 
its delicate, reserved power, its freedom from loaded 
pigment and its intensity of characterization, gives 
not only accurate rendering of the externals of cos- 
tume and feature, but reveals qualities of mind and 
heart. It is a great and noble portrait. 

At one end of the gallery is Anthony Van Dyck’s 
portrait of James Stuart, Earl of Lennox, who was 
a cousin of Charles I, of England. Van Dyck at 
nineteen was in the studio of Rubens in Antwerp, 
and even then had some reputation as a portrait 
painter. After two years’ study with this master he 
spent some time in Italy, painting portraits and 
studying the great Italian painters. Later, a few 
years after his return to Antwerp, Van Dyck was in- 
vited to London by Charles I, and there he remained 
for practically the rest of his short life. How pop- 
ular and how busy this fashionable court painter 
became is attested by the tremendous body of his 
work. Unfortunately, the demands on his time 
could not be met, so there is a great proportion of 
work which he left to his assistants after his first 
rapid study of the sitter in black and white chalk was 
completed. His practice of using servants of his 
establishment to furnish models for the hands of his 


JAMES STUART, DUKE OF LENNOX, 
ANTHONY VAN DYCK 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


Ae ae te en 


THE MARQUAND GALLERY 2 


sitters also is evidence against the sincerity of much 
of the portraiture labeled “Van Dyck.” Yet in his 
work, for the king or for his friends, the artist 
shows himself a consummate master of his craft. 

This portrait is typical of Van Dyck’s power to 
invest his subject with an air of good breeding and 
refinement that seems to correspond to an inward 
fineness and dignity of nature. This young noble- 
man, with his pendent jewel of the Order of the 
Garter, its star embroidered magnificently on his 
black coat, and his rich, but tasteful costume, has the 
negligent, self-assured bearing that bespeaks utter 
confidence in oneself and one’s position. Yet there 
is no assertiveness or insolence in the pose. The ease 
of the outspread hand on one hip and the graceful 
posture of the whole body appear natural and char- 
acteristic, as do the direct, fearless gaze and protec- 
tive gesture of affection to the greyhound huddled 
against him. For all the exquisite elaboration of the 
lace collar and details of his dress, there is breadth 
and vividness in this portrait. The face, particularly, 
is beautifully modeled, while the whole figure is 
handled with the precision and restraint of refined 
technique. 

Two portraits by the fifteenth-century Italian, 
Sebastiano del Piombo, show him abandoning the 
glow of his Venetian coloring for a sober austerity of 
color scheme. Both of these works were carried out 
in his Roman period when he was working under 
Michael Angelo. They reflect much of the influence 
of the great master. The portrait of Columbus, 


28 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


a posthumous one, is more than life size, majestic 
and imposing. The other, “Portrait of a Man,” 
with its grandeur of design, its reserve and an almost 
severe restriction of palette, possesses great dignity 
and sincerity. 

The center painting of this hall, the “Colonna” 
Madonna and Saints, or “Virgin Enthroned with 
Saints,” is by Raphael, an early work carried out for 
the nuns of the Convent of St. Anthony of Padua, 
at Perugia. It belongs to the early period of — 
Raphael’s work when he lived in Florence. In this 
one artist there seems to be summed up all the varied 
expressions of the art of the Renaissance. He had 
been a pupil of Perugino and absorbed much of his 
manner. Coming to Florence, he came directly 
under the influence of Fra Bartolommeo and studied 
the work of Donatello, Leonardo and Pollaiuolo, so 
that on his Umbrian suavity and sentiment was 
grafted the Florentine science of mass, volume and 
movement. 

In the group of this altar-piece there is much of 
Perugino, especially in the type of the Virgin with 
her somewhat affected pose of head. The dignity 
and force of the heads of Peter and Paul and the 
careful architectonics of the harmonious composi- 
tion, with its depth of perspective and fine space re- 
lations, indicate other influences. The softness of 
the Umbrian landscape and the elaborate character 
of the ornamental details again remind us of Peru- 
gino. The figures of the Child and St. John are, 
curiously enough, clothed, because, as Vasari tells us, 


Py ee ene 


THE MARQUAND GALLERY 29 


the nuns who ordered the altar-piece, “those simple 
and pious women willed it so.” The virgin saints 
crowned with roses, and the mood of emotional 
susceptibility to beauty of form and color, give this 
work a gentle serenity of impression. In the 
tympanum lunette is a figure of the Almighty in the 
act of blessing the group. The predella panels are 
in England in the possession of different individuals. 
A number of sketches for this composition are also in 
England. The painting passed from the possession 
of the nuns of St. Anthony of Padua—they were 
forced to sell it to obtain funds. It was bought by 
the Colonna family of Rome and kept by them for a 
long time. From that fact it is often called the 
“Colonna Madonna.” 

Allegory seems to us to-day rather a limping 
Pegasus to trust to for any inspired flights. Yet in 
this same gallery there are two magnificent allegor- 
ical canvases, “‘Mars and Venus” by Paolo Veronese 
and “Venus and Adonis” by Peter Paul Rubens. It 
is not difficult to realize why these artists turned joy- 
fully to allegory as an escape from either the con- 
ventional restrictions of religious subjects or the real- 
istic limitations imposed by portraiture. 

Veronese was a Venetian of the late Renaissance, 
one of the three great figures of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. Essentially a decorator, he was absorbed in 
rendering the pomp and splendor of life and the 
glory and magnificence of Venice. His beautiful 
arabesques of pattern with their silvery sheen and 
opulent color, as one sees them in this group, reveal 


30 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


his ability to build up grandeur of design with easy 
fluency of painting. The blonde, radiant Venus, 
standing with her hand upon the neck of Mars, serves 
as a complete foil for the latter’s powerful figure as 
he bends his dark head against the nacreous whiteness 
of her shoulder. The deep blue drapery on the fig- 
ure of the goddess, the gleaming gold armor of the 
god, the fall of the reddish blue folds of his cloak, 
the beautiful architectural detail of the back- 
ground, the distant landscape, the woodeny charger 
(which is surely one of the horses of St. Mark’s 
come to life), are warp and woof of a splendid pat- 
tern. The breadth and luminous effect of the paint- 
ing are due in no small measure to the coolness of 
the high lights and the rich flood of color in the 
shadows, characteristic of much of the work of this 
painter, while the beauty of his space relations and 
the surety and mastery of his brush work are truly 
magical. In the ripple of light and color in his 
stuffs there is a remarkable range of tones, as well as 
a silvery brilliancy of sheen. 

Rubens is, of course, one of the Titans of paint- 
ing, and this glowing allegory of “Venus and 
Adonis” is carried out with such apparent ease and 
vigor that one might not suspect the precision, science 
and delicacy of technique responsible for its har- 
monies of composition and color. It was painted 
in his middle period when his violence of dramatic 
action and striking oppositions of color were modi- 
fied to a greater suavity and serenity. The beautiful 
nude Venus, with the set of the fine head on the 


MARS AND VENUS UNITED BY LOVE. PAOLO VERONES 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


> 


THE MARQUAND GALLERY 3 


slender white throat and her radiance of gleaming 
flesh, is a voluptuous pagan figure, even if it is a 
Flemish interpretation of paganism. One feels that 
Rubens suffered from no complexes, but gave rein to 
his delight in splendid types of robust manhood and 
luxuriant womanhood. This painting was at one 
time in the possession of John Churchill, Duke of 
Marlborough, a gift from the Emperor Joseph. It 
is one of several developments of the same theme 
by the painter, possibly influenced by Titian’s render- 
ing of the subject. Probably the landscape and dogs 
were put in by Rubens’s assistant, Jan Wildens. 
Since this is a loan painting, and might disappear, it 
may be better to discuss Rubens later with the Dutch 
school. | 

In decided contrast to these large allegorical can- 
vases with their gorgeous paraphernalia is the small 
painting hanging at one end of the Marquand Gal- 
lery. It is “A Visit to the Nursery” by Gabriel 
Metsu, a Dutch painter-of the seventeenth century. 
It is a genre picture, that is, a picture of familiar, 
everyday life, in which the setting and background 
are to be reckoned with as well as the figures. The 
lightness and delicacy of the work, the feeling for 
niceness of scale and distribution of light, are also 
factors of great importance. Metsu was a pupil of 
Gerard Dou, who in turn was a pupil of Rembrandt, 
so he stemmed directly from the traditions and in- 
fluence of the great master. Here we have the anec- 
dotal interest of the painting quite subordinated to 
the beauty of its substances and textures and the 


32 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


lovely pattern of light that bathes the whole room, 
with no sharp contrast of light and shadow but 
rather a diffusion of golden atmosphere. In the 
glistening white satin dress of the young mother 
with its contrasting red jacket or the dull white linen 
wrappings of the child, the rich color of the Persian 
rug on the table and the brilliant gleaming surfaces 
of the silver vessels, you can see*how easily Metsu 
could vary his manner of brushwork to fit the occa- 
sion, giving crispness, or solidity or translucence as 
the various substances require, yet fusing them all 
into a beautiful harmony of surfaces, smooth and 
glowing. For all this exquisite nicety of finish, 
there is breadth and fine unity of underlying design 
to which each note of color and each varying com- 
ponent of detail serve as accents of emphasis. 


CHAPTER ‘THREE 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 


EAVING the Marquand Gallery where we 

have lingered so long, we now pass through 
the right-hand door at the back and crossing Gallery 
12 pass into Gallery 39, which contains Italian paint- 
ings of the fourteenth century. In the works of 
Titian and Veronese we have seen some of the last 
flowerings of Italian art; now we may trace a few 
of its beginnings. The term “Italian art” is a most 
misleading one, for it seems to imply something 
national and unified, whereas in its early history 
Italy was, as a matter of fact, broken up into city- 
states perpetually at war with each other. In these 
isolated towns and cities, separated by the violence of 
internecine war as well as actual physical distance, 
strongly individual forms of art arose. Influences 
seeped through the barrier of warfare and animosity 
and modified the native genius of local work, yet 
there is a marked character in the artists of different 
divisions of Italy—Lombard, Sienese, Florentine, 
Venetian or other schools. 

We may begin with Sienese art in this gallery, 
since there is here a remarkable altar-piece of the 
fourteenth century by Segna di Bonaventura, of 
Siena. Before we get to Segna, however, we must 

33 


34. NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


go back a moment to the founder of this school, Duc- 
cio di Buoninsegna, whose genius makes him one of 
the great figures among the early Italians. It is said 
that Duccio had a teacher from Byzantium. 
Whether this report is true or not, the fact remains 
that at this period Siena was in close contact with 
Byzantine art, particularly with its illuminated 
manuscripts, and must have been profoundly influ- 
enced by its peculiar artistic conventions. Byzantium 
(the modern Constantinople), as the capital of the 
Roman Empire under Constantine, was a converging 
point for currents of Oriental and Western influ- 
ences, Christian and Mahometan; these merged in 
a Christian art that was as far as possible from any 
realistic representation, but had a symbolical con- 
vention for natural forms. Its angularity and sharp- 
ness of line indicate how much both geometrical 
ideals of Oriental art and Eastern calligraphic design 
prevailed in this compromise. Mosaic was one of 
the favored materials for Byzantine work, the un- 
yieldingness of this medium exactly suiting the ri- 
gidity of accepted artistic theories. Even the brilliant 
blue and gold backgrounds of this work could not 
mitigate the strange, awesome effect of its repre- 
sentations of mysterious and ascetic figures un- 
touched by emotion or sympathy. Into this formal 
art Duccio managed to infuse warmth and gentle- 
ness, while not diverging too widely from its con- 
ventions of angularity and rigid symbolism. His 
great “Majestas,” in Siena, is not only impressive 
and resplendent in its richness of decoration, but it 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 35 


is endowed with a new sentiment of humanity and 
tenderness. 3 

Segna di Bonaventura, as did many of the fol- 
lowers of Duccio, continued to work in the Byzan- 
_tine manner, rendering the folds of the draperies, as 
here, with fine gold lines. He preserved the mysti- 
cism of the old conventions while he softened the 
harshness of the outlines, adding something personal 
to the interpretation. Here we have angels and 
apostles on each side, and in the central panel the 
Virgin, clad in the rich blue tradition demanded, 
with a head covering of warm peach color and hold- 
ing a deep red drapery about the Child. In this 
altar-piece, we have the characteristics of late Byzan- 
tine art in the high finish, the definiteness of forms 
and the use of gold and gem-like color, but also we 
have a new ideal of a tender poetic character, which 
We associate with Sienese art. It is still decoration 
with little interest in solidity or structure, with con- 
centration on finish and brilliant color, but it is also 
imbued with gentleness and spiritual tenderness. 

There is here a “St. Catherine” by Pietro Loren- 
zetti, a follower of Duccio, that shows the Sienese 
love of ornament, rich tones and exotic types of 
beauty. The brocaded green and gold gown of the 
saint, her wine-colored mantle, the gold background, 
the crown and halo tooled in gold, make a decora- 
tive effect increased by the arched top of the panel 
with its ornamentation of black and red against tin- 
foil. 


here is also a Sienese “Life of Christ,” a 


36 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


triptych, which is highly decorative; gold bands of 
stamped pattern divide it into sixteen scenes. The 
figures have a curious Gothic tempering which sug- 
gests Northern influence. 

The big processional banner by Spinello Aretino 
makes a brave showing. It was originally painted on 
both sides, but has now been backed by canvas. It 
represents Mary Magdalen enthroned with angels 
playing on instruments, and tiny kneeling figures 
in the foreground. The banner, executed for the 
Brotherhood of San Sepolcro, at Gubbio, must have 
made a fine effect in procession. It seems rather 
cold and hard with its pale gold, cool greens and 
rose, but the well-contrived design carries trium- 
phantly. Part of its original architectural border had 
to be cut off, so the banner was formerly larger and 
still more imposing. 

The origins of the Florentine school are repre- 
sented by an “Epiphany,” attributed variously to one 
of Giotto’s followers. Giotto was such a tremendous 
phenomenon on the art horizon that he left a host of 
disciples who continued, for the most part, to copy 
the obvious characteristics of the master with little 
comprehension of his depth and scope. Florentine 
art is something of a link between Greek art and the 
modern world, for it had close affiliations in its 
source with the Roman school (particularly in the 
work of Pietro Cavallini), and this same Roman 
school never quite lost sight of classic tradition. So 
that, if in Giotto we are surprised to find that dra- 
matic movement, solidity, mass in the human form 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 37 


and greater freedom of composition supplant the 
Byzantine stiffness and flatness characteristic of early 
Italian art, much of this superiority is due doubtless 
to Giotto’s contact with the Roman school. Even in 
this work by a follower of Giotto, there is more than 
a hint of the master’s power to convey emotion by 
bodily gesture, his love of the picturesque and the 
epic quality of his genius. The strange combination 
of the figures of the nativity, the angel and shep- 
herds, with the magi of the Epiphany makes a curi- 
ous ensemble, but there is a delightful, homely 
intimacy in the attitudes and gestures, while in the 
figure of the Madonna and Child there are dig- 
nity and a sense of brooding divinity. The color is 
clear and glowing. 

These disciples of Giotto, Giotteschi, as they were 
often called, were to continue the tradition of the 
great artist in more and more diluted power until the 
appearance of another original creative genius in 
the person of Masaccio. One of these Giotteschi, 
Taddeo Gaddi, was associated with Giotto as pupil 
and assistant for more than twenty years; he was also 
Giotto’s godson. An altar-piece by him in this room 
indicates clearly how clever a craftsman he was and 
how uninspired an artist. The robustness of the 
dignified figures of the saints and their slanting eyes 
recall Giotto, but the Virgin and the angels are far 
too sugary. It is a pretentious tableau rather than a 
lofty religious group. However, it is pleasant to re- 
call that even if Taddeo, with all his striving to 
reach the tremendous height of his master, still re- 


38 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


mains a secondary figure, he had the honor of com- 
pleting the unfinished campanile, in Florence, at the 
death of Giotto and also the credit of designing and 
carrying out the Ponte Vecchio. 

Another primitive, this time of the Venetian 
school, is also here in “Christ Rising from the Tomb,” 
by Michele Giambono. As in the case of the artist 
of the Florentine “Epiphany,” Giambono is not an 
important artist or the founder of the school, but he 
is interesting because he illustrates how Venetian art 
was throwing off its purely Eastern character and be- 
ginning to be affected by the realistic tendencies of 
more developed schools. The first glance at this 
gaunt, emaciated figure with its distortions of line 
recalls Byzantine work and reminds us how long the 
Venetians remained under Oriental influence. For 
Venice, isolated on her lagoons, turned to the East 
for her commerce and was in turn profoundly in- 
fluenced by her intercourse with Eastern civilization. 
The magnificence of the aristocratic republic was 
amply expressed by the splendor of the decorative 
art of Byzantium and its formal hieratic style, so 
that it was long untouched by the artistic awakening 
of the rest of Italy. Decades after Giotto had 
painted his magnificent frescoes in near-by Padua, 
Venice continued to cherish these exaggerated, for- 
mal types of Byzantium with their green underglaze 
and elaboration of gilding and ornament. In other 
works of Giambono there is evidence of later in- 
fluence, both Florentine and Veronese, that modifies 
his set artistic expression and gives it some realism 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 39 


and vitality, but in this limp, almost grotesque figure 
with its emphasis of tragic pose the character of 
much of early Venetian painting may be appre- 
hended. 

The set of panels which form a predella, or base of 
an altar-piece, representing the “Life of St. Lucy” 
repay study for their vividness, the richness of their 
coloring and their really poetic treatment of this 
theme from the Golden Legend. They are of Tus- 
can origin and indicate that the painter had studied, 
or perhaps worked, with Fra Angelico, whose 
“Nativity” is to be seen in the adjoining gallery. In 
predelle where the conventions of a serious altar- 
piece did not limit the painter, there is always more 
freedom of subject and treatment. The fancy of 
the artist is allowed scope and more liberty of cre- 
ative expression, so that for all their seeming in- 
significance they usually have much interest and 
value. The panel representing St. Lucy refusing to 
move when bidden by profane persecutors, although 
teams of lusty oxen are harnessed to drag her, is a 
dramatic scene. 

A wooden panel, probably executed by Giovanni 
da Milano, of the “Virgin and Child with Donors” 
is amusing with its little donors kneeling solemnly 
at each end of the painting, anxiously getting into 
the picture and seeking approbation for their gener- 
osity in providing this fine decoration. There is the 
Sienese love of ornate design with something of the 
new science of Florentine painting, and even a touch 
of other influences, in this quaint little semicircular 


40 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


panel with its warm color. A “Madonna and 
Child” on a wooden panel is by Lorenzo il Monaco 
and shows a sort of transition between Sienese art 
and the Florentine painting of the Giotteschi. 
There is no attempt at any literal representation, — 
the old hieratic type is still followed but there is a 
sense of animation and dramatic gesture with nicely 
chosen color. A series of three panels from a chest, 
or cassone, should be noticed, for it is a typical form 
of Italian decorative art. These octagonal panels 
with their elaborate borders, their gold backgrounds, 
coats of arms and emblematic banners represent 
scenes from the war of Charles of Durazzo against 
Otto of Brunswick and give a vivid commentary on 
feudal warfare. At the right you see Charles at- 
tacking the army of Otto, at the left entering the 
city of Naples, and in the center receiving the sub- 
mission of the conquered Otto. 

A note that must be inserted here is a reminder 
that in this period oil painting was not practiced. 
These paintings are executed in tempera, that is, the 
color was tempered by yolk of egg or other sub- 
stances. As a medium there is much to commend ~ 
it, because of its clearness, delicate bloom of surface 
and definiteness of outline, as well as the important 
feature of its surprising permanency. 

Passing into Gallery 38, we leave the so-called 
“Primitives” and enter the sphere of the early 
Renaissance, which may be roughly marked as the 
opening of the fifteenth century. The “St. Ursula” 
at the left barely gets in under this chronological 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 4I 


barrier. It is a Venetian painting, with much of 
the Gothic in its character. It has, somewhat, the 
gorgeous decorative effect of old miniatures or even 
of enamels in its gilded relief against a background 
of vermilion. The saint, in a mauve robe figured 
with gold and a deep blue and gold mantle lined 
with green, is surrounded by a resplendent group of 
her maidens clad in exquisite tones of pale pink, 
green and gray with gold patternings. It is a bril- 
liant and charming decoration, but it is also an 
apparent attempt to differentiate individuals and 
_ get away from the conventional generalization of 
types. This fact is quite evident if you gaze closely 
at these clustering maidens with their little blobs of 
noses and round staring eyes. The legend of St. 
Ursula and her maidens departing on their pilgrim- 
age to meet a tragic death was one of the favorite 
stories of an age that loved its stories told over and 
Over again as any bedtime child. But it is seldom 
that such a magnificent little St. Ursula or gay bevy 
of maidens is met with. | 

The series of scenes from the tale of the Argo- 
nauts also shows this delight in story-telling. The 
panels were probably parts of chests. We have a 
curious interpretation of classic myth in the idiom 
of another people and another psychology, as also 
an indication of the growing interest in classic sub- 
jects and antiquity. The “Crucifixion” by Pesel- 
lino, a Florentine who did not live long enough to 
fulfil his promise, is particularly interesting for its 
background of naturalistic landscape. The glowing 


: 


42 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


sky and the dark pines and cypresses of his own 
Tuscany with hovering clouds above are far differ- 
ent from the medizval character of its conventional 
figures and foreground. 

The most absorbing painting in this gallery is the 
little panel of the “Nativity” by Fra Angelico, al- 
ready referred to. It is quite possible that some of 
the work was carried out by fellow workers or pupils, 
for in some details there is a difference of handling. 
But this fact does not detract from its importance or 
its immense significance as the work of a figure that 
looms large in the epoch following the Giotteschi. 
On the wall near the entrance is a “Madonna” at- 
tributed to Masolino, which shows the character of 
Fra Angelico’s painting to a marked degree. It is 
not difficult to understand how such a painter exerted 
great influence, for in Fra Angelico we see the old 
medizval ideas giving way to the naturalism that 
marks the fifteenth century. It is, doubtless, the in- 
fluence of Fra Angelico upon Pesellino that ac- 
counts for the modern feeling of the landscape in 
the “Crucifixion,” with its effect of distance and 
atmosphere. 

Fra Giovanni da Fiesole—or, as we know him 
better, Fra Angelico—was a Dominican monk who 
came to Florence about the middle of the fifteenth 
century and became a member of the community of 
San Marco until he was summoned to Rome to work 
for the Pope in the Vatican. Because of his naive, 
almost childish, faith and ecstatic joy in both his re- 
ligion and his painting, he was called by the monks 


THE NATIVITY. FRA ANGELICO 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 43 


of his order “Angelico,” the angelic, or sometimes, 
“Beato,” the happy. Much of his work reflects this 
ecstasy of emotion, this delight in joyous color and 
tender, sweet interpretations of holy legends. Part 
of this predilection for clear, brilliant color and ex- 
quisite detail of flowers and happy creatures who 
dance and sing eternally bathed in blissful rapture, 
came from his early training as a miniaturist for illu- 
minated manuscripts. His later work shows his 
reaction to the influences of the Renaissance, particu- 
larly to the scientific spirit of Florentine painters. 
From an idealist with a simple clarity of anecdote 
garnished with marvelous delicacy of color and 
charming types of saints and angels, he became an 
innovator, employing difficult feats of foreshorten- 
ing and aerial perspective, and, as in this panel, 
showing robustness of conception and strength of 
composition. True we still have the delightful gar- 
land of angels above the roof of the stable and the 
exquisite tenderness of the Madonna’s bowed head. 
But the figure of Joseph is solidly modeled and 
shows power of characterization. The Holy Family 
kneeling in the little court into which the curious ox 
and ass gaze reflectively, as well as the peeping shep- 
herd, lose no whit of their deep devoutness because 
the painter has become a close observer of natural 
phenomena or records his observations in a scientific 
as well asa religious temper. This panel lacks the 
dazzling clarity of pure high color that marks much 
of this artist’s work, but it shows a matured and tem- 
pered idealism that marks a high point of his powers. 


44 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


It is impossible not to feel the influence of Fra 
Angelico in the beautiful “Madonna and Child” 
which we have referred to, here attributed to Maso- 
lino. Since this painting is from the estate of 
Theodore M. Davis, which is still in litigation, there 
is no need of going into any technical question 
about a work which may not eventually become 
museum property. It appears, however, that Dr. 
Richard Offner’s attribution to some follower of 
Fra Angelico is probable. It is a distinguished 
painting, exquisite in color,.imbued with spiritual 
significance, carried out with solidity and vigorous 
handling. There is in it a fine balance between 
naturalism and poetic interpretation that gives the 
work great power. 

Giovanni di Paolo’s “Paradise,” depicting figures 
newly arrived in a Paradise of flowery meadows 
where angels guide them to a radiance pouring from 
some celestial source or showering upon them in 
golden rays, has the full richness of Sienese coloring. 
It is a Tuscan hillside made into a wonderful mille 
fleur tapestry, with its fine, sinuous line enmeshing 
leaves and flowers, fruit and nibbling rabbits as back- 
ground of the delightful groups of fashionable fif- 
teenth-century figures with charming costumes and 
graceful gestures, or churchmen in all their splendid 
regalia of office. Each little cluster of figures makes 
a separate composition, yet takes its part in the pleas- 
ing pattern. Doubtless there was originally another 
panel to show the tortures and terrors of the lost _ 
against this foil of glowing beauty. 


PARADISE. GIOVANNI DI PAOLO 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


. 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS — 45 


Francesco di Giorgio, also a Sienese, presents an 
amusing “Triumph,” which indicates the new fash- 
ion of classical subjects, although there is nothing 
classical in the rendering of the theme—a lady in 
a brocaded gown is drawn in a gilded chariot by two 
lean griffins and is surrounded by an escort of blonde 
ladies clad in brocades and quite modish with pearl 
necklaces and gloves, while more attenuated griffins 
bring up the rear of the procession. 

Another Sienese painter, Benvenuto di Giovanni, 
is represented by an “Assumption of the Virgin” in 
the old ideal of decorative and poetic work, charac- 
teristic of this school, while Bernardina Fungai, in 
his “Nativity,” shows how much later artists of Siena 
were influenced by other schools. It is, certainly, a 
far step from this healthy and blooming Virgin ele- 
gantly attired to the severe, ascetic, spiritual type of 
the Madonna of Segna di Bonaventura! The land- 
scape is filled with a multiplicity of detail in the 
background and many diverting incidents, but the 
artist has been able to subdue all this elaboration 
into a pleasing ensemble bathed in a cool, silvery 
light. 

At one end of the gallery there is a large painting 
of “Four Saints” by Filippo Lippi which is in a bad 
state of preservation, the head of one of the saints 
being quite obliterated and much detail and color 
totally lost. Yet from this wing of an altar-piece 
in a damaged condition, one may see what breadth 
there is in the handling, what plastic quality in the 
figures with their broad masses of rich color melting 


46 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


into one hue and then into another, producing not 
only a wealth of color but a subtle refinement not 
to be found in other contemporary work. The seiz- 
ing of character marks the especial characteristic of 
Lippi, for he did much to humanize the religious 
conventions of his day and make his saints and holy 
figures near to their living models. Yet there is a 
gentle, poetic quality also in his sensuous beauty. 
To realize how far he advanced in his realization of 
naturalistic types, compare the “Madonna and 
Child” by Bramantino, a Lombard painter, which 
hangs near. In Bramantino’s work there is no 
warmth or sympathy, the human form, or his ideal- 
ized representation of it, is used only as a motif in 
decoration and remains cold and aloof. There are 
a number of interesting panels, such as those from 
a cassone, which show Florentine buildings in the 
background or those depicting scenes from the life 
of King Nebuchadnezzar on three sunken panels, or 
the panels by Botticelli, which were probably for 
the decoration of a chest to contain clerical vest- 
ments. In this last work there are no subtleties of 
color but sharpness of outline and clarity of pattern. 
Like all such narratives, progressive action is shown 
by the depiction of different incidents of the same 
episode against a common background. The sub- 
ject of the panels is the miracles of St. Zenobius. 
The line is energetic, giving precision and vigor to 
the contours. The colors are brilliant, with no deli- 
cacy of finish, but lending an emphasis to the mosaic 
of the lively design. 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 47 


Two marriage salvers, deschi da nozze, contribute 
a touch of the domestic intimate life of the early 
Renaissance. These platters, really wooden panels 
of twelve sides, were used to carry gifts and were 
themselves, no doubt, the most treasured part of 
some wedding offering preserved for the decoration 
of the new home. The paintings on these two 
salvers of the late fourteenth century are carried 
out in an absolutely realistic manner, rather than 
with a decorative intent. They apparently illustrate 
episodes in some familiar story and have a gay, en- 
gaging character quite removed from the more seri- 
ous aspects of contemporaneous paintings concerned 
with religious subjects. One of these salvers shows 
so charming a mountain landscape that one does not 
wonder that its proud recipient, or her descendants, 
cherished and preserved it. 

In the next gallery, number 35, we make ac- 
quaintance with a great story teller, Benozzo Goz- 
zoli, whose pageant of the “Adoration of the Magi” 
makes such a splendid decoration on the walls of 
the chapel of the Riccardi Palace, in Florence. The 
panels here are parts of a small altar-piece, painted 
for a chapel in the Church of San Pier Maggiore in 
Florence. They represent the fall of Simon Magus, 
as told in the Golden Legend, the conversion of St. 
Paul, a miracle of St. Zenobius and an incident in 
the life of St. Benedict. There is not much religion 
in these entertaining panels, but there is the charm 
of well-told incident related in a chatty, intimate 
style with a certain gorgeous panoramic boldness of 


48 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


presentation. There is much of the medieval and 
Gothic in both the conception and technique, but the 
spirit of pageantry and vitality shows the artist to 
be a true child of the Renaissance, an engaging nar- 
rator of incident, if somewhat inclined in his larger 
works to be redundant and garrulous. His magnifi- 
cence of decoration had much effect on artists of 
his own and a later day. The predella panels by 
Botticini depicting respectively “Tobias and the 
Angel,” the “Marriage of the Virgin” and the 
“Burial of St. Zenobius” show.a phase of this delight 
in story-telling, although here the subjects are reli- 
gious and the treatment more suitable to such themes. 
There is much breadth in these charming little scenes. 
The panels of a cassone depicting hunting scenes, the 
work of Piero di Cosimo, are full of classic allusion 
in their satyrs, strange animals and centaurs in com- 
bat, carried out with decisive line and vigorous com- 
position in browns and ambers. This work has full 
Renaissance flavor in its conceptions and vital, alert 
style. A charming head of “John the Baptist” by 
the same artist is in the next gallery, 36, which holds — 
the Dreicer collection. 

The “Nativity” by Fiorenzo di Lorenzo shows 
the influence of Benozzo Gozzoli in its picturesque 
interpretation of Biblical story and its idyllic setting 
of Umbrian landscape for the figures. In its small 
compass this is remarkably varied and shows the 
artist a delightful raconteur able to give piquancy 
and interest to a much-painted theme, as well as 
suavity and charm through the landscape setting. 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 49 


The “Descent from the Cross,” school of Filip- 
pino Lippi, follows in its general plan the altar- 
piece now in the Academy, in Florence, which was 
begun by Lippi, but finished by Perugino. The 
composition indicates that it belongs to the late 
period of Lippi’s work when his natural repose and 
idealism were being supplanted by a realism and a 
search for dramatic impressions. 

The tondo by Lorenzo di Credi depicting the Ma- 
donna kneeling in adoration before the Child lying 
on the ground, with the infant St. John also kneeling 
and an angel supporting him, is finely composed with 
its beautiful background of landscape and fine space 
filling. The figures have more majesty than is usual 
in di Credi’s work while the beauty of the brilliant 
surface, almost enameled, and the ease of the 
rhythms make this a delightful work. 

“Three Saints” by Lorenzo Costa, for all its im- 
posing proportions and pleasing passages of color, 
has little significance. It may be that working with 
Francia, the great eclectic, Costa became too suave 
and many-sided to have much flavor. But it is in- 
teresting to note in this painter of Ferrara, who 
forms something of a link between his school and 
that of Bologna and Venice, how much the different 
local schools influenced and were in turn influenced 
by each other. 

Two horrible examples are in this gallery in the 
sense that it is painful to find artists of even average 
ability drawn into imitation of a dominating figure 
of their contemporary artistic world. In the sugary 


50 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


“Girl with Cherries” by Ambrogio de Predis, pupil 
and assistant of Leonardo da Vinci, and the ‘“Ma- 
donna” by Gianpetrino, which is palpable imitation 
of Leonardo, one sees pleasing talent gone wrong. 
The imposing figure of “St. Christopher,” a fresco, 
of the school of Pollaiuolo, is of colossal size. It 
indicates the attempt of the artist himself, and his 
followers, to find a means of full artistic expression 
in the human form, usually rendered with dynamic 
force and scientific thoroughness of anatomical 
structure. | 

In the next gallery, 34, we arrive at the High 
Renaissance in paintings of the fifteenth and six- 
teenth centuries. The “Madonna and Child,” a 
tempera painting by Giovanni Bellini, although from 
the Theodore Davis estate, cannot be passed by, for 
it is perhaps the loveliest of this artist’s earlier works. 
The figure rises majestically, filling the arch of the 
panel and creating an impression of more than hu- 
man power blended with adoring tenderness. Its 
pearly coolness of color illustrates the merits of this 
medium, which have already been referred to, for 
the exquisite bloom of the color, the incisiveness 
and clarity of the whole painting, with its beauty of 
surface and transparency of tones, make a decided 
impression. There is a solemnity in this figure, a 
fine sincerity in its conception and a mastery in its 
handling, with no attempt at chiaroscuro or exag- 
geration of emphasis, but reliance on contour for its 
modeling. Another “Madonna and Child” by Bel-’ 
lini dates from the early period of his use of oil as 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 51 


a medium. This manner of painting had been in- 
troduced in Venice in the latter part of the fifteenth 
century by Antonello da Messina. ‘This early oil 
painting contains a quality of nacreous light that is 
reminiscent of his tempera paintings. The Mother 
leans out against a dull reddish-orange curtain. She 
is hardly characterized in the aloofness of her some- 
what hieratic expression. The Child seems to look 
with fascinated gaze at some object not in the pic- 
ture. Another almost similar composition by Bellini 
in which cherubs attract the Child’s attention 1s 

often referred to in explaining this curious effect. 
Here he models with fused light and shade, em- 
ploying marvelous richness of color and surety of 
drawing while keeping the interest concentrated on 
the religious content of the subject in a tender, 
poetic version of the sacred theme. 

A “Pieta” by Carlo Crivelli, a contemporary of 
Bellini’s, shows the old Byzantine tradition con- 
tinued in the work of this Venetian, who lived apart 
from the artists of his day, at Ascoli on the Marches, 
and perpetuated Gothic influences. This ‘“Pieta” 
indicates some of his characteristics in its precision of 
contours, its monumental character, its emaciated 
forms and its elaboration of ornament, gilding and 
decorative accessories. There is deep sincerity in this 
painting with a fine dignity of presentation. The 
fluent rhythms and balance of composition give it 
an impressive character. 

A painting by Carpaccio, “Meditation on the Pas- 
sion,” forms a curious contrast to the usual style of 


52 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


this painter of ceremonial and pageantry. Here the 
dead body of Christ rests on a broken marble throne. 
On each side of him sit lean, withered old men 
surrounded by symbols that identify them more or 
less clearly as St. Onuphrius and St. Jerome. There 
is an enormous stretch of background infused with 
a melancholy beauty and filled with a remarkable 
amount of detail. The meditation on the atonement, 
as the evident theme of the painting, gives an austere 
character to the work, accentuated by its mystical 
symbolism. ‘Though not characteristic of Carpaccio 
in its general tenor, it illustrates his combination of 
religious painting with decorative style, employing 
rather exotic material for much of his meticulous 
and overabundant detail. The fact that this paint- 
ing has a false signature attaches a curious interest 
to it. 

A rather affected portrait of a man is attributed 
to Andrea Solario. A pleasing “Virgin and Child” 
is by Vincenzo Foppa, of the Brescian school, dec- 
orative in its skilful combinations of rich color set 
off by the gold of the haloes. There is a little of 
the majestic quality of Bellini’s Madonnas in this 
Virgin. An imposing “Madonna and Child,” by 
Bartolomeo Montagna, portrays the Madonna in her 
conventional blue mantle before a beautiful land- 
scape background of peaceful river and fortified 
town. The whole painting is full of atmospheric 
effect, cool and pearly in tone. The figure of the 
Madonna is given dignity and pathos, and a warmth 
of humanity, yet is finely restrained in its treatment. 


EARLY ITALIAN PAINTINGS 53 


A “Madonna and Child” by Bartolommeo Vivarini 
shows the influence of Carlo Crivelli in its orna- 
mental treatment, its frank decoration of fruits and 
flowers and its crispness of contours. The Madonna 
is curiously imperturbable, unmoved apparently by 
the angels who play on instruments or the Child 
who seems to demand her attention. A portrait by 
Vincenzo Catena gives an impression of a vigorous, 
powerful man with a direct, active nature. It is a 
far more interesting work than the canvas of the 
“Circumcision” by the same artist, also here. A 
portrait by Moroni of “Bartolomeo Bongo” is a life- 
size figure seated and turned partly to the beholder. 
It is a distinguished, realistic portrait broadly han- 
dled and finely designed with harmonious balance 
of rich, dark tones, but it has not much penetration 
of character or intimacy of revelation. The portrait 
of “Cosimo de’ Medici” by Bronzino is much like 
the one in the Academy in Florence, but evidently an 
earlier work. Bronzino was court painter to Cosimo. 
Although he was no colorist, he had a remarkable 
power of interpreting the character of his sitter and 
gave his portraits a fine distinction. 

A predella by Perugino is an important work, for 
it is rare to come upon any painting by this artist in 
our galleries. It is a rather hackneyed composition 
that the painter employed more than once, and the 
figures are also familiar in much of Perugino’s work. 
The impassivity and exaggerated serenity of many 
of these figures, detached from each other and from 
the scene in which they appear, is characteristic of 


54 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


the artist, as is the placidity of the landscape and 
the haze in which it is wrapped. There is a depth of 
religious emotion in this work, emphasized by. 
the strange self-absorption of the figures and the 
stretch of empty landscape. One cannot judge of 
this painter by so small a fragment of his work, yet 
even here may be discerned much of his power of 
composition, his understanding of perspective and 
warm color, as well as his poetic, contemplative 
mood. 

There are many other interesting paintings in these 
last three galleries which so casual a guide cannot 
pause for, but the wanderer may enjoy them at lei- 
sure. Among them the “Man and Woman at a 
Casement,” probably by Uccello, illustrates the 
Florentine passion for geometry and realism. It 
will probably impress you as remarkably modern. 
Or, there is the “St. Barbara,” by Francia, with its 
mingling of Perugino and Raphael and its suggestion 
of how little borrowing avails if it cannot be 
assimilated. 


CHAPTER FOUR 


LATER ITALIAN PAINTING 


TALIAN painting of the sixteenth to the eight- 
eenth century is shown in Gallery 30; this is 
reached from the previous gallery, 34, by crossing 
the adjoining one, reserved for special exhibitions. 
This later period of Italian art, though containing 
a few great names, is in general one of decadence, 
marked by the decline of political power in Venice, 
then the art center of Italy. 

Two of the great names, Titian and Paolo Vero- 
nese, have already been considered in the Marquand 
Gallery; a third, that of Jacopo Robusti, or Tinto- 
retto, is represented here. ‘Tintoretto was a sobri- 
quet applied to the painter; he began life as an 
apprentice to his father, a dyer, and so earned the 
title of “Tintoretto,” the little dyer. He is not 
adequately represented here. From the preliminary 
sketch of “A Doge in Prayer before the Redeemer,” 
formerly in the possession of Ruskin and occupying 
a place of honor in his dining-room at Denmark 
Hill, it would be difficult to judge of the genius of 
the painter. It is an interesting composition—the 
Doge, with four patron saints of his family to attend 
him, occupies the center of the picture where the 
apparition of a majestic Saviour appears with an 
element of dramatic surprise. The Doge’s palace is 

55 


56 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES — 


at the left, while a landscape of shipping and palaces 
fills the background. There is some impression of 
Tintoretto’s vigor, abrupt foreshortening and dra- 
matic effects in this unfinished work, but there is no 
revelation of his power of bold projection, vehe- 
mence of attack, sense of rapid sweeping motion, or 
wealth of resonant color. In his methods of broken 
tones he anticipated much of the later tenets of im- 
pressionism. His influence might have extended far 
and developed a new school, but for the political 
catastrophes that overtook Venice after his death. 
His portraiture deserves consideration by itself, for 
he was preéminently a portrait painter. 


An example here (from the Davis collection, 


which pops up in this listing like the head of Charles 
II in the unfortunate Mr. Dick’s memoirs) is of 
“‘Varchi, the Historian,” with its correct, ceremonial 
attitude, demanded by the manners of the time, and 
its subordination of costume and setting to the in- 
herent dignity and intellectual sobriety of the sitter. 
It is a portrait that, because of its simplicity and quiet 
handling, gives the impression of a penetrating and 
truthful characterization. 


A “Holy Family” by Andrea del Sarto, a Floren- 


tine painter living and working well into the six- 
teenth century, depicts the Child, St. John, the Vir- 
gin, and a glimpse of St. Joseph in the background. 
Its composition reminds us of other groups by this 
artist, notably his “Charity,” and in its grandiose 
style and statuesque character indicates what a strain 
it must have been to the artists of the day to keep up 


LATER ITALIAN PAINTING 57 


with the vogue for grandeur set by the monumental 
work of Michael Angelo. Del Sarto’s marvelous fa- 
cility in drawing led to his being called the “faultless 
painter,” but it also led to his falling into a formal 
academic mannerism in his later work. The bril- 
liant coloring of this painting has none of the soft 
fusion of color and light seen in his most impressive 
works lending a note of mystery and the melt- 
ing of lighted forms into the shadows. But even 
here, where there is harshness and hardness of tone, 
there is suavity and easy dignity of handling. There 
is little religious feeling, perhaps, in the work, but 
it is heroic and monumental in conception and 
structure. 

The handsome altar-piece by Girolamo di Libri, 
of the Veronese school, was painted for the church 
of San Leonardo, near Verona. The Virgin is seated 
with the Child beneath a luxuriant tree of rich, green 
laurel, whose deep glossy leaves seem to rustle 
against the blue sky. Four saints are grouped about 
her while three delicious child angels play and sing 
for her edification. There is much symbolism in 
the whole painting, skilfully woven into the compo- 
sition—the dead tree represents the tree of the for- 
bidden fruit of man’s fall, with the peacock, 
resplendent of tail, perched on its branches, a symbol 
of the resurrection—but the interest of the big can- 
vas lies especially in the beguiling landscape of the 
background with its rocky height crowned with a 
castle and its swelling green fall of hill and valley. 
The color appears rather garish and startling here, 


58 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


yet in a dark church it would be subdued to pleasing 
warmth to accentuate the grandeur of the compo- 
sition. | 

The “Four Saints” by Correggio, an early work, is 
rather gaudy in its oppositions of blue and vermilion 
and has none of the transparency of tone or dramatic 
effect of illumination so often found in his work. A 
portrait of a young man by the Venetian Lorenzo 
Lotto shows how much of subjective interpretation 
this painter was able to infuse into his realistic por- 
traiture. His richness of coloring and his power of 
penetrating the character of his sitter are well illus- 
trated in this painting. “St. Matthew and the 
Angel,” by Savoldo, a pupil of Bellini, attempts an 
intricate study of different lighting effects, with 
moonlight from the window, candle-light in the 
room and a glimpse of figures in firelight outside. 
The colors and textures of the deep pink robe of 
the saint and the mauve and blue of the angel’s gar- 
ment are finely realized with the conflicting rays 
of light playing upon them. Two more portraits 
are by Moroni—one of “A Warrior,” in which he 
shows himself the professional painter, depicting his 
subject in rather a conventional attitude, dressed in 
rich velvet, gold striped, near a pedestal on which 
rests acasque. The portrait of “A Prioress” has re- 
markable characterization in the strong, rather heavy 
features under the close cap and overfrilling of 
transparent white. The whole scheme of grays and 
white lend emphasis to the vital force of this middle- 
aged face, hardly spiritual, for all the open book of 


= 


MADONNA AND CHILD WITH SAINTS. 
GIROLAMO DAT LIBRI 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


LATER ITALIAN PAINTING 59 


prayer, but powerful. Beneath the parapet against 
which the figure stands, is a legend showing that this 
Prioress was of noble birth as well as ecclesiastical 
distinction. 

A late Venetian, Pietro Longhi, is represented by 
some charming panels, genre scenes, which reflect the 
intimate life of his day with glimpses into boudoirs 
and drawing-rooms and a flavor of intrigue and ex- 
travagant, opulent living. There is sensuous beauty 
in these little scenes which have no shadow of moral- 
izing or rebuke but give delightful transcripts of a 
colorful, picturesque society, decadent, possibly, but 
graceful and amusing. Canaletto, another late Ve- 
netian, is seen near by in “The Piazzetta,” showing 
the entrance to the Grand Canal with many famous 
buildings, notably Santa Maria della Salute, in the 
distance. The mathematical preciseness of the com- 
position and the concentration on architectural detail 
incline one to believe the statement that this artist’s 
canvases were plotted with a T square and compass, 
but they are usually redeemed, as in this case, from 
a formal architect’s rendering by the nobility of the 
conception, the crisp touch, the bath of atmosphere, 
balance of shadowed masses and the breadth and 
openness of the sky. The rendering of the different 
building materials is carried out with exact knowl- 
edge of their textures and substances, but the free- 
dom of handling and the beauty of atmospheric 
effects deliver the work from photographic realism. 
The canvases by Guardi, shown here, lack the beauty 
of color and luminous qualities found in his best 


60 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


work. Guardi gives the sparkle and color of Vene- 
tian water and skies in limpid tones where Canaletto 
renders something of the city’s grandeur and the 
romance of her historic past. _ 

A colorful painting by Carlo Caliari, the son of 
Paolo Caliari, or Veronese, as we best know him, 
shows how the decorative quality and glowing color 
of the father were continued in the harmony of the 
son’s warm color schemes and good design. 

The “Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes” by Tin- 
toretto indicates how little religious sentiment the 
time demanded of such a theme. The gay, indiffer- 
ent groups of colorful ladies intent on anything but 
the miraculous happening, the interesting concentric 
pattern with its wave on wave of linear design focus- 
ing on the figure of the Christ, make this a curious 
conception. Its position on the wall high above other 
canvases prevents much appreciation of its qualities. 
Moreover, the light is so unfortunately distributed 
upon it at most periods of the day as to make a view 
of the entire canvas at one glance impossible. 

In this gallery there are also paintings by such 
late artists as Guido Reni and Salvator Rosa. 
Neither should detain one long. Guido, a follower 
of Carvaggio, a late painter of central Italy, is an 
able enough painter, but the sentimental rhetoric of 
his work is not alluring. - In Salvator Rosa’s self- 
portrait the skull and melodramatic pose reveal him 
as a romanticist out of his time, to be sure, but with 
much of the later-day feeling for landscape and 
décor. 


a es, ee Oe ee ee 


LATER ITALIAN PAINTING 61 


Passing from this gallery into Gallery 31-A, we 
find a ceiling by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who has 
been called the “last of the old painters and the first 
of the moderns.” This decoration was painted for 
the Palazzo Barbaro, in Venice, in the period at 
which the artist’s powers were at their height. The 
subject represents the glorification of some ancestor 
of the Barbaro family, probably Francesco Barbaro, 
who had many claims to fame, among them the de- 
fense of Brescia when it was besieged by the armies 
of the Duke of Milan under the famous condottiere, 
Piccinino, an incident replete with thrilling details, 
but only one of the long series of wars and conflicts 
between the Italian cities. 

This ceiling was part of a whole scheme of dec- 
oration for a complete room, but this magnificent 
centerpiece deprived of its rightful setting is still 
realized as a glorious performance. ‘The hero, in 
the manner of the time, is represented in classic cos- 
tume seated on a ruined cornice, his general’s baton 
held in his right hand while his left arm rests on the 
Lion of St. Mark. There is no attempt, apparently, 
at portraiture, but the conventionalized, majestic fig- 
ure is surrounded by allegorical virtues, all resting in 
a sea of clouds flushed by sunset. The spirit and 
vivacity of the painting, the beauty of color and 
the richness of imagery are sustained in the structure 
of design of this sumptuous work. There is re- 
markable luminosity and buoyancy of form in this 
decoration with its floating figures gleaming through 
radiant clouds that reflect a light from some distant 


62 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


source. The mastery of aerial perspective and the 
freedom and facility of his work leave one amazed. 
It may seem a bit theatrical, but in its proper setting 
of architectural decoration it could leave little to be 
desired. 

Passing into Gallery 32 we find a ceiling by Pin- 
turicchio, painted for the reception hall of the 
Petruzzi Palace, in Siena. This room has been re- 
produced in its actual dimensions and the twenty- 
two panels set in their original relation with the 
squares of ornament surrounding them. Four of the 
six lunette-shaped panels that were at the outer edge 
and mouldings and ornamental reliefs, cast from the 
original decoration still in the Palazzo, complete the 
elaborate scheme. This vaulted ceiling had long 
been hidden by the ceilings and partitions of the 
wretched rooms built into the once magnificent 
palazzo, now almost a crumbling ruin. The room 
was almost square and the ceiling, as may be ob- 
served, was separated from the walls by brackets and 
arches on each side. These brackets, decorated with 
gold on blue, support a sort of gilded candelabra and 
tablets with mottoes. Above are eagles from whose 
outspread wings floating ribbons and clusters of 
grapes spread out. The panels between the arches 
have allegorical figures—Muses, easily recognized 
by their symbols. In the central panels of the quad- 
rangle are gods and demigods, and triumphs of war 
and peace. In the middle, supported by puzti and 
floating garlands, was evidently the coat of arms of 
Pandolfo Petrucci, a tyrant of Siena, for whom the 


LATER ITALIAN PAINTING 63 


decoration was executed. The walls of the reception 
hall were also decorated with frescoes by celebrated 
artists of the day and with carved wood pilasters by 
the famous Bandi. Pinturicchio came to Siena to 
carry out the decorations of the Library of the 
Duomo. It is said that in this work he was assisted 
by the youthful Raphael. In those glowing panels 
he shows himself a magnificent illustrator and re- 
corder of pageantry more than in these small ones 
where he was restricted in his composition. He com- 
menced the work for Pandolfo in 1508 and com- | 
pleted it in 1509, three years before the death of the 
Tyrant. This same Pandolfo had the picturesque 
and checkered career common to tyrants and great 
political adventurers, for he was exiled in youth by 
the Noveschi, a band of nine men who governed the 
city, but later he returned via a scaling ladder up the 
city walls and by machinations and intrigue, as well 
as by force of arms, obtained absolute power and put 
an end to the rule of the Noveschi, which had flour- 
ished for two hundred years. Among other interest- 
ing details of his life are the assassination of his 
father-in-law and an alliance with Cesare Borgia. 
An alliance which proved too dangerous to be 
maintained. 

If one wearies of gazing upward at the marvels of 
this ceiling, there are delightful bits of Italian fur- 
nishings and some beautiful illuminated miniatures 
from manuscripts in the room. One of the most in- 
teresting of these exhibits is the cover of a Sienese 

book of accounts with portraits painted in the manner 


64 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and coats of arms of the 
magistracy administering the commune. It is one of 
the few account books that can bring anything like a 
thrill to the unmathematical and casual mortal who 
dislikes the very thought of accurate reckonings. 

In Gallery 31-B is one of the most fascinating ex- 
hibits of the museum, beautiful drawings by Michel- 
angelo for his “Libyan Sibyl” of the Sistine Chapel. 
Even the casual glance we may give them in passing 
assures us of the marvelous quality of line that 
creates this plastic form, almost titanic in its monu- 
mental simplicity. You see vitality and an austere 
dignity in these unfinished sketches, sculptural vi- 
sion, nobility of conception and power of handling, 
even in this study of the nude male model that is 
to serve for the figure of the Sibyl in the finished 
fresco. 


CHAPTER FIVE 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 


LTHOUGH we may retrace our steps at this 
point and enter Gallery 40 back of Gallery 39, 
the retreat is only topographical, for in point of 
chronology the Northern schools follow the Italian. 
German, Flemish and Dutch art were influenced in 
varying degrees and manners by Italy, since Chris- 
tian art penetrated this Northern world through 
Rome. The beginnings of these schools are most 
uncertain. Furthermore, at no stage of their various 
developments do we find the illumination of a garru- 
lous, picturesque, if inaccurate, biographer, such as 
the Italian painter, Giorgio Vasari. The north of 
Europe developed painting much more slowly than 
Italy, for in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries 
when Giotto and the Giotteschi were covering the 
walls of Southern churches with great frescoes, the 
Northern artists were still spending their gifts upon 
the meticulous illumination of miniatures. It is pos- 
sible that the actual beginning of Flemish painting 
came from the natural enlargement of these manu- 
script miniatures into pictures, for the early artists 
show the qualities of the trained miniature painter 
in devotion to decorative detail and precision. 
As far as it has been possible to trace the origins 


of Flemish art, it appears to begin in a burst of glory 
65 


66 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


with the work of the two brothers, Hubert and Jan 
Van Eyck, in the fifteenth century. It is probable 
that these gifted artists were the final flowering of 
a school of lesser and now forgotten artists, but there 
is nothing to indicate who or where the forerunners 
of this remarkable pair were. If they were not the 
originators of painting in oil, they were the first 
artists to use this medium consistently and effectively. 
This perfection of a mechanical invention gave them 
a vehicle to express their native genius. The early 
development of oil painting in the Netherlands may 
be due in a large measure to the fact that tempera 
frescoes possess no permanency in so damp a climate, 
but tend to peel off. Moreover, the type of North- 
ern church architecture with its extensive use of win- 
dows left little wall space for decoration. Evidence 
of a long experimentation in the North with the 
grinding and manipulation of colors with oil is indi- 
cated further by the proficiency in this work shown 
by artists of the German school of Cologne, who 
were contemporary with the Van Eycks. Unfortu- 
nately it is not possible here to judge of the flower- 
ing of Flemish art in the work of these two brothers. 
Yet some of the general characteristics of the early 
school may be realized from the polyptych of the 
“Life of St. Godeliéve” with its five panels crowded 
with the incidents of childhood, marriage and mar- 
tyrdom. 

In this late fifteenth-century painting much of the 
style of the miniature painter is still evident in the 
exquisite precision and elaboration of ornament. 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 67 


The rather awkward angular figures seem crowded 
into the composition in a straggly effect rather than 
with any balance of masses. There is, however, ob- 
vious skill in the portraiture, power to depict figures, 
landscape, architecture and the setting of interiors 
with meticulous accuracy of detail. Sincerity and 
homely tenderness of religious sentiment pervade 
this work, although there is none of the depth and 
ecstatic fervor of greater Flemish works. These 
quaint panels show so little of the influence of Italy 
in their leaning to naturalism and sober simplicity 
that it may well be that the first impulse to painting 
came to the Flemish artists from the French minia- 
turists, as is often held, rather than from the gran- 
deur and breadth of the Italian style. You feel that 
these artists looked about them in their everyday 
world and painted what they saw there with careful 
observation of tone and texture, perspective and 
light, and in this naturalistic setting placed their fig- 
ures from holy legends or Bible story. 

A late fifteenth-century work, a triptych, “Mass 
of St. Gregory, St. Michael, St. Jerome,” is even 
more reminiscent of a miniature in its carved and 
gilded setting and its enameled surfaces. The saint 
tramples a little hesitantly upon the writhing dragon, 
but this uncertainty in the drawing of the figure is 
more than atoned for in the finished craftsmanship 
of the detail. The glowing landscape backgrounds 
and the rather painful symbolism of the passion 
combine delight in natural forms with a real depth 
of religious feeling. The “Adoration of the Magi,” 


68 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


by some painter of the school of Ghent, takes a 
favorite subject which allows an ornate development, 
since the gorgeous textures and colors of the stuffs 
and the gold and embroideries, jewels and regal 
paraphernalia follow the costumes and settings of 
miracle plays rather than any attempted verisimili- 
tude of period and people. 

With the “Annunciation” of Roger van der 
Weyden there comes an echo of the Van Eycks, for 
this artist’s early master, Robert Campin, was prob- 
ably a pupil of Hubert Van Eyck. Van der Weyden 
is supposed to have started life asa sculptor. There 
is something oz sculptural solidity and relief in his 
figures. The angularity of the forms and the curi- 
ous rendering of draperies do not conceal his power 
of composition in placing the Virgin and Angel quite 
lucidly against an elaboration of background. ‘he 
delicacy of contour of the Virgin’s face and the ex- 
pressiveness of her bodily gesture also reveal indi- 
vidual gifts. The charming landscape seen through 
the pillars, the sharp pattern of the tessellated floor, 
the richness of the costumes and furnishings, show 
familiar characteristics of the Flemish school, yet 
for all his precision and minuteness of record there 
is breadth of effect. 

A “Deposition” attributed to Petrus Cristus recalls 
that this artist during a visit to the court of the Duke 
of Milan, at Naples, was probably responsible for 
initiating Antonello da Messina into the technique of 
oil painting, and that Antonello introduced it in 
Italy. 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 69 
A pupil of van der Weyden’s, Gerard David, is 


represented here by two canvases, neither of which 
shows how much of an artist he was at his best. The 
‘Virgin and Child,” one of a number of replicas, 
breathes a homely tenderness from its domestic set- 
ting, but has none of the old fervor of religious feel- 
ing. David’s pupil, Adrian Isenbrandt’s ‘Ecce 
Homo,” on the other hand, preserves much of the 
medizval mysticism and sobriety of earlier work. 
In Memling, represented here by a “Virgin and 
Child,” we have one of the great artists of the 
Flemish school. The firmness of contour and the 
solid modeling of the heads of the Virgin and the 
Child are notable, as well as the gentleness and re- 
ligious devoutness of the conception. 

“Adam and Eve,” attributed to Mabuse, brings us 
well into the sixteenth century when the influence of 
the Italian Renaissance gained more and more upon 
the Northern painters. We shall come upon more 
work by this artist, but this small panel indicates his 
skill as a craftsman and colorist, as well as his rather 
superficial, if decorative, treatment of his themes. 
The design is taken from a print by Marc Antonio, 
with the detail of background suppressed for these 
melting blue ranges of hills and stretch of green 
valley. The arabesque of the trees is pure orna- 
ment. It is thoroughly a classic pastoral in the Ital- 
ijanate manner with none of the old devoutness of 
religious sentiment. 

In this same gallery we come upon beginnings of 
Dutch art in the “Pieta,” or “Mourning over the 


70 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


Body of Christ.” Early work of this sort is ex- 
tremely rare, for in the later ardor of the Reforma- 
tion, the Dutch scraped off their church frescoes or 
whitewashed them over and destroyed pretty gener- 
ally any vestiges of a religion that was synonymous 
with both religious and political persecution. Hence, — 
it is not until the seventeenth century when the 
Dutch were free from outside domination that their 
art developed in its thoroughly national character. 
This “Pieta,” with its angular, distorted figures in 
awkward grouping and exaggeration of gesture, re- 
flects the Gothic character of all early Northern 
schools, and is a reflection of the gloomy, mystic 
temper of the North with its borderland of the gro- 
tesque and horrible, a residue from old folklore and 
legend. This intensity of religious emotion makes 
itself felt in this painting, however little there is of 
reality in the attenuated forms and naive attitudes. 

Another early Dutch work, “Madonna and 
Child,” is attributed here to Aelbert van Ouwater, 
who worked in Haarlem in the last half of the fif- 
teenth century. If not actually by his hand it is of 
his following and has the directness and seriousness 
of the period. There is a painting of the Madonna, 
in the National Gallery, in London, by Dirk Bouts, 
a Dutchman from Haarlem who later became iden- 
tified with the Flemish painters, that is remarkably 
like this one in its handling. Not only in the con- 
trast of pale flesh tones with the rich blues and reds 
of the garments, but in the arrangement of the fig- 
ures, and the marvelous quality of the translucent 


THE ANNUNCIATION. ROGER VAN DER WEYDEN 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 71 


surface that gives it the glowing splendor of a jewel. 
The Madonna is thoroughly Dutch, and how 
quaintly Dutch, the Child, but through the window 
there is a glimpse of a landscape that might be 
Italian. 

Passing into Gallery 37, we may turn to sixteenth- 
century Flemish painting in its transitional mo- 
ment when Renaissance art was seeping into the 
North, though the old methods were still in evi- 
dence. In the “Adoration of the Kings” by Quentin 
Massys there is still much of the Gothic in the atten- 
uation of the figures, and the extreme nicety and 
precision of detail, yet how much breadth, freedom 
and variety are also here and how little conventional 
piety. Massys has been called the last of the Gothic 
painters, but note what elaborate Renaissance Italian 
architecture there is in the background of this work 
and the suggestion of a classic ruin in perspective. It 
is interesting to see how he has subordinated this 
ornate architectural background to the figures who 
loom up more than life size before it and hold their 
own against its rich arabesques of pattern. The Vir- 
gin is the graceful, languid type that followers of 
this artist imitated for many years. The richness 
of the color—blue, green, purple, red—the uplifted, 
jeweled vessel, the gold embroideries and sheen of 
silks and velvets make the whole effect sumptuous. 

Another rendering of this subject, “Adoration of 
the Magi,” by an artist of the Antwerp school, in its 
ornateness and opulence brings to mind the close- 
ness of the origins of Flemish art to that of the 


42 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


skilled artificers in crafts that required the most pa- 
tient, minute perfection of detail, the most exigent 
training of hand and eye, whether it is the handicraft 
of the jeweler, the illuminator, or the weaver of 
tapestries. It also reminds us of the florid taste and 
luxurious scale of living of the rich burghers of 
Antwerp who liked this display of technical inge- 
nuity, the profuseness of ornament and richness of 
display. 

Decidedly in contrast to this painting is the other 
“Adoration of the Kings,” by Hieronymus Bosch, a 
Dutch painter of the sixteenth century. Bosch is 
often a contriver of diableries, grotesque and boldly 
extravagant, with the satirical thrust that is found 
so often in the work of the Netherland artist of 
this time. Here unexpectedly there is no satire or 
mockery, but graciousness and an almost poetic ten- 
derness. The traditional treatment—the Virgin in 
her dark, blue robe sits enthroned holding the Child 
on her lap, while the kings bear gifts and Joseph 
kneels reverently—is enlivened by a remarkable as- 
semblage of details. Small angels hold up the can- 
opy of the Virgin’s throne, the landscape background 
holds no less than the city of Jerusalem, a lake and 
a castle on a rocky height. There are not only 
shepherds, the usual ox and ass, but a wealth of curi- 
ous minutia, such as the owl hidden in the hole in 
the wall, the bird’s nest with eggs, the little dog, that 
give the painting the character of a picture puzzle 
where one may continually come upon a new find. 
The freshness of the interpretation of an old subject, 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 73 


the gay whimsicality of the treatment and the rich- 
ness of creative imagination make this a fascinating 
picture, while its blond glowing color indicates a high 
degree of technical ability. 

To Lucas van Leyden is attributed a tempera 
painting on linen, “Joseph’s Coat,” probably one of 
a series depicting the story of Joseph’s life. Van 
Leyden is one of the most important of the early 
Dutch painters, and as an engraver his work ranks 
still higher. He was a friend of the great German 
master, Albrecht Diirer, whose praise and esteem he 
won. In his painting his portraiture has power and 
directness while his more ornate compositions in the 
style of this one lack interest and originality. There 
is something a little borrowed and insipid in this 
reflection of Italian ideas. His talent and tempera- 
ment do not seem congenial to the mood of elegance. 
It is interesting to remember that Lucas van Leyden 
Was in a sense the forerunner of the later Dutch 
naturalistic school, for he had a vivacious interest in 
the forms and aspects of the world about him while 
his power of swift draughtsmanship recorded his 
sensitive vision and left a host of fascinating sketches 
of his daily world, trivial and commonplace as it 
might seem to more pompous artists. Of the work 
of Engelbrechtsen, a “Crucifixion” rather painfully 
realistic is noteworthy because van Leyden was fora 
time his pupil. A portrait by Martin van Heem- 
skerck, a straightforward and able performance, re- 
calls the supposition that this artist was the first to 
introduce portrait painting into Holland. 


74 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


In this gallery we come upon the third of the 
Northern schools, the German, which was, itself, for 
a long time composed of local schools with strongly 
marked characteristics, accentuated by the natural 
boundaries of river and mountain that tended to 
keep districts immune from direct influence upon 
each other. German art developed late, following 
down into the fifteenth century the archaic, rather 
stilted style of the old miniatures and conventional 
altar-pieces, with obvious influence of French work. 
The painter-engravers, such as Schongauer, Diirer, 
Cranach, however, broke up the isolation of differ- 
ent artistic communities, for the engravings circu- 
lated widely and spread a type of art that emphasized 
linear design. The theme, already so familiar, of 
the “Adoration of the Magi” is developed here by 
the so-called “Master of the Holy Kinship.” It has 
the crowded, huddled composition of much of Gothic 
work, with naive delight in decorative detail, es- 
pecially in such touches as the gold sky against which 
the landscape rises quite unabashed by this splendor. | 
The banners, the adoring little angels, the splendid 
costumes and the bit of Italian carving, are all more - 
expressive than the faces and gestures of the group. 
This artist, who is supposed to have been a designer 
for stained glass, makes this surmise quite credible 
by the static arrangement of his figures and the 
lovely color of his painting, beautifully modulated 
for all its gorgeousness. 

A painting of another type is the “Christ Blessing, 
Surrounded by Donor and Family,” by Ludger Tom 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 75 


Ring. It is an amusingly naive conception, for the 
figure of Christ is completely engulfed by the self- 
satisfied family of generous donors in the central 
panel, while each side contains an additional bene- 
factor. Most conscientiously, with no regard to the 
possible awkwardness of the revelation, the age of 
the donor is painted above each figure. Power of 
portraiture, interest in naturalistic representation and 
deviation from the conventional standards of eccle- 
siastical paintings are obvious in this work, as well 
as the lack of ensemble, angularity of forms and flat- 
ness of modeling. Another instance of this power 
of German portraiture is the “Portrait of a Man and 
His Wife” by Ulrich Apt, a member of the Augs- 
burg school. In this double portrait something of 
the Renaissance influence appears in its greater seren- 
ity and balance of mass, and its effectively modeled 
heads. The painting of the fur, the stuff of the 
woman’s green gown and close white headdress and 
the stretch of landscape glimpsed through the win- 
dow, with its river, town and distant mountains is, 
if somewhat brittle, the work of no mean artist, 
while the curious look of understanding and secrecy 
that seems to pass between the pair is arresting. 

The portrait by Bernard Strigel shows more 
fluency and sophistication. It is the work of an 
artist about whom little is known. The craftsman- 
ship of this work speaks for itself. 

A remarkably fine portrait, showing Italian influ- 
ence in its sensitive handling, its delicacy of model- 
ing and fluency, is labeled “Portrait of a Gentle- 


46 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


man” and dated 1491. (The artist is not known, for 
the initials “H. H.” behind the sitter’s head do not 
convey much identity. The curiously posed hands, 
the fleeting, sidelong glance of the eyes and the ex- 
quisite bit of landscape in the background add to 
the fascination of this work. It seems much more 
subtle, more facile and more graceful than the usual 
German portraiture of this date. It is a painting at 
which one would like to linger for speculation as to 
its esthetic genealogy as well as for enjoyment. 

In this gallery there is also-a portrait by Hans 
Holbein of “Lady Guildford” that records a high 
mark of German portraiture. Holbein spells the 
Renaissance in Germany, following Diirer by nearly 
a quarter of a century. Hans Holbein first came to 
notice because of his wall decorations in fresco, 
as well as his paintings and the remarkable series of 
engravings, “Dance of Death.” He also designed 
metal work and stained glass, but finally devoted 
himself to his particular gift, that of portraiture, be- 
coming court painter to Henry VIII of England. 
Holbein was one of the infant prodigies who fulfil 
their early promise. He traveled in Italy and the 
Netherlands and both Italian and Flemish influences 
may be felt in his work. Yet he is free from imita- 
tion, assimilating merely enough of foreign methods 
to enhance his native talent and strong racial charac- 
teristics. This portrait of “Lady Guildford” illus- 
trates his power to combine absolute fidelity of ob- 
jective truth with subtle design and minute detail. 
The lady’s elaborate headdress with its gold brocade 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 77 


and pearls towers up impressively in a sort of pyra- 
mid. Her black dress cut squarely at the neck is 
hung with heavy gold chains, and a further decora- 
tive note is added by the swirl of the grapevine 
carved around the column at the back. There is a 
marvelous skill in the precision of the execution, 
in the delicacy of the modeling of the head against 
the sky, in the power of the incisive line that holds 
the graceful detail into such firm design. To this 
incomparable rendering of the physical characteris- 
tics of his sitter he adds a vivid summary of her na- 
ture, a miraculous revelation of her character in 
terms of objective truth. Among the collection of 
the museum’s miniatures, there is an exquisite one 
by Holbein, also of an English subject, “Thomas 
Wriothesly,” that shows how broadly a miniature 
may be handled and with what consummate skill and 
maturity of knowledge he executed this type of 
work. , 
Unfortunately, the great Diirer is not represented 
here by any painting adequate to convey his genius. 
Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “Portrait of the Duke of 
Saxony” brings us one of the last of this golden age 
of German art, before it became so engrossed in sen- 
timent and story-telling that art became a secondary 
consideration. Cranach is an original artist, curi- 
ously archaic, showing no concessions to schools or 
fashions of his day. His compositions are usually 
awkward, the portraits often having the air of 
crowding into their frames. Frequently in his work 
the emphasis on linear design betrays the engraver. 


78 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


He was, in fact, not an able technician as far as brush- 
work is concerned, but there is a peculiar individual 
charm in his line and fantastic conceptions. As court 
painter to the Duke of Saxony he did the portraits 
of all the ladies, portraits so much in demand later 
that they were widely imitated. His curious capri- 
cious fancy is shown in the “Judith and Holofernes,” 
also in this gallery, with its strained, almost ridicu- 
lous proportions, exaggeration of costume and ges- 
ture. Yet this painter represents so vividly the psy- 
chology and genius of his time and race that he pos- 
sesses an unusual fascination in all his work, even his 
strange, brown nudes which seem to follow no ac- 
cepted canons of beauty. 

In Gallery 36, which holds the Dreicer Collection, 
we find an ornate portrait of “Eleanor of Austria,” 
attributed to Mabuse. Her hair is bound witha nel 
fillet under her hat. The hat’s brim is looped up 
with big pearls. Both neck and shoulders are fes- 
tooned with barbaric gold and pearl ornaments and 
there is a hard, metallic luster to all this splendor 
that gives the portrait a rather garish effect. This 
same paraphernalia of costume and jewels is found in 
the portrait of Eleanor by Clouet, which now hangs 
at Hampton Court. There are so few paintings that 
can be authoritatively assigned to Martin Schon- 
gauer, that we cannot be precisely sure the painting 
of “Three Saints” here is actually by his hand. But 
it matters little, for it is of his school and shows the 
influence of Schongauer in the clarity of the design 
and the naturalistic treatment of religious themes. 


yp fo wunasnpy unjyodosja jy 


WACIAY AHL TAOANUd UALAId ‘“SUYALSHAUVH AHL 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 79 


The rich coloring may be due to Flemish example, 
for van der Weyden is supposed to have been 
Schongauer’s master, but in the essential character 
of the work it is thoroughly German. Schongauer, 
the first of the great engravers, brought a new im- 
petus and interest to art through the widespread cir- 
culation of his prints. In his painting he depended 
largely on linear pattern with something of the in- 
tricacy of calligraphy. Yet his feeling for subordi- 
nation of detail and clear good design sets him apart 
from the men of his day. You see something of the 
ornamentalist here in the elaboration of the rose 
trellis of the background. 

A painting by van der Weyden, “Christ Appear- 
ing to His Mother,” shows this artist at a high mo- 
ment of his power. The placing of the figures, the 
beautiful background of landscape glimpsed through 
the pillars and the effective frame of the recessed 
doorway with its wealth of detail scrupulously ren- 
dered give distinction to this work. It is the central 
panel of a triptych of which the two side panels, 
showing the “Deposition” and “Holy Family,” are 
in the cathedral at Granada. 

Passing through Gallery 36 into the galleries of 
Italian paintings and through Gallery 29 of Spanish 
works, we come upon Flemish paintings of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries. At the left as 
we enter is “The Harvesters” by Pieter Bruegel the 
Elder. It forms one of a series of paintings on the 
seasons in a vast panorama of hill and valley, village 
and harvest fields which reach up into the fore- 


80 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


ground with figures of workers or other peasants at 
rest beneath a tree. It is almost an epitome of the 
peasant, of his world and his labor, given in these 
external truths of his surroundings and his bodily 
gesture. For all its incredible detail it is carefully 
drawn, yet with a freedom that gives the impression 
of extemporary brushwork rather than a pulling of 
everything into the hard and fast bounds of a pre- 
conceived design. The underground painting with 
its colors worked in gives a blond warmth to the 
whole work. It is impossible te judge of the wealth 
of this artist’s endowments from this one painting, 
for he was a symbolist, a satirist, a painter of re- 
ligious themes and of tremendous canvases of land- 
scape and figures, as well as an engraver and 
draughtsman. But at least it is easy to realize how 
out of the fashion of his day he was in depicting 
peasants and the realism of their surroundings when 
borrowed Italian elegance was the fashion of the day. 
It is dificult to turn away from this painting, each 
figure, each pose is made to say so much of individual 
character and of the type and yet is related so clearly 
to an epical interpretation of both man and nature. 

Rubens, the great figure of Flemish art, is repre- 
sented here by several religious subjects, portraits 
and a big canvas of “Wolf and Fox Hunt.” Rubens 
is so colossal a figure, bestriding his own time and 
that of posterity by the sheer force of his genius, that 
it is hard to write of him in a measured way. He 
was a darling of the gods, handsome, rich, a friend 
and associate of princes at whose courts he sometimes, 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 81 


as he jestingly said, “played the diplomat,” and an 
incomparable artist so that his whole life is a progress 
from one triumph to another. He seems to have 
been endowed with unquenchable energy and vigor 
to supplement his illimitable invention and superb 
craftsmanship so that he has left behind so enor- 
mous a body of work that its bulk alone is amazing. 
He studied and absorbed both in Italy and in Spain, 
the works of the great Italian masters, adding the 
resources of the Renaissance to his own native talent 
and evolving a sort of composite style that yet was 
entirely his own in its complete assimilation of for- 
eign influences to his own gifts. As you will see 
from this early painting it is an exuberant, rather 
grandiose, style, full of vigor, color and movement. 
Yet when you look closely at this canvas you will 
also recognize what a patient craftsman this artist was 
and how delicate his technique. He modified the 
Venetian method of translucent underpainting, or, 
perhaps, it is better to say he grafted it on to his 
Flemish training, which already had this tradition 
of reducing the underpainting to a transparent thin- 
ness in which the opaque color was blended. In 
some parts of this painting you can see the wispy 
lines of color dragged into this underpainting with 
that marvelous sureness of hand and precision of 
rapid brushwork which distinguish Rubens for all 
time. He drew as he painted, keeping a smooth 
beauty of surface except in the high lights where 
his brush loads on the pigment, as we noticed in the 
“Venus and Adonis” of the Marquand Gallery. The 


82 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


figures on horseback are supposed to be the painter 
himself and his first wife, Isabella Brandt. It is 
probable that the background was painted by Jan 
Wildens. In all this struggling mass of figures, to 
which the big progressive rhythms give such aston- 
ishing movement that there is nothing static in the 
whole canvas, there is a coherence of design in line 
and mass that knits the composition together harmo- 
niously. In his work you can see the solution of 
Florentine problems of mass, movement, and space 
composition with the splendor-of Venetian coloring 
and individual brilliance of conception and technique. 
Rubens is not often thought of as a portrait 
painter, for his big allegorical and religious pieces 
were more in the line of his robust execution and 
exuberant creative imagination. Yet one has only to 
remember the superb portrait of Isabella Brandt in 
the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, to realize what fluent, 
crisp modeling of form his lively brush could effect, 
and what a marvelous endowment of vitality and 
glowing beauty it could bestow upon the sitter who 
was congenial to him. In the “Portrait of an Old 
Man” the character of the man is seized and rendered 
vividly with a penetration that blends physical char- 
acteristics with habits of mind. It is unfinished, for 
the eyes are not painted in, vet it is surprisingly 
alive in its ruddy coloring, its sense of weight and 
mass and its suggestion of complacent egotism. 
There are also religious studies by Rubens here, and 
two portraits by another great figure of this century, 
Van Dyck, whose work we have already noted. 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 83 


In the next gallery, 27, we find both Flemish and 
Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. The 
severity of the Reformation had left no opportunity 
for ecclesiastical art. In republican Holland there 
was no court or reigning family to paint, but there 
were wealthy burghers who liked to have their pres- 
tige and their wealth confirmed for later generations, 
while all the guilds and rich corporations seized upon 
portraiture as a means of recording their importance. 
But along with this portraiture, there was a develop- 
ment of landscape painting (early seen as back- 
grounds of conventional figures such as the Ouwater 
“Madonna” of Gallery 40), those lively little genre 
paintings called “conversation pieces,” and still life 
of a most elaborate character. Most of all it should 
be borne in mind that Dutch art, unlike Italian, 
which was developed to embellish public places, 
church or palace, was a domestic art intended for 
home adornment, dealing with its subjects in an inti- 
mate rather than a grand manner. 

One of the early Dutch portrait painters is Miere- 
veld, represented here by several works, one of them 
“Ta Dame de la Collarette,” in which he appears a 
meticulous craftsman expending a marvelous fidelity 
of observation and exquisite precision on rendering 
of the white lace collar over the dark stuff of the 
dress. It is admirable work, but not especially vital 
or original, Many pupils of Rembrandt appear 
here, Maes, whose “Portrait of a Woman,” life size 
and stolid, shows him wavering between his own 
predilections. and his desire to follow the manner 


84. NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


of his master so that little comes off in the large can- 
vas. In his small conversation pieces this same 
painter shows himself an admirable painter of light. 
Van der Helst also is represented here. He is an 
artist of great unevenness, wavering between one 
manner and another, achieving the distinction at 
times of having his work taken for that of Rem- 
brandt and having a decided influence upon Van 
Dyck. Cornelis de Vos and Ferdinand Bol also 
show the decidedly high average of Dutch portrait 
painting and its following in the tradition of Rem- 
brandt in the treatment of light and shadow. Rem- 
brandt himself is represented here and Hals. An 
unusual portrait, “Head of a Man,” is by Adriaen 
Brouwer. Brouwer, even more than Hals, has left 
a reputation for riotous living and dissipation. He 
drew from the loose life and wild companions of 
his choice the subjects of his paintings, tavern life, 
revelers, gamblers and companions of debauch. His 
pictures were in great demand in his lifetime, his 
early death being due to excesses and not to neglected 
genius. Probably such a type as this man with his 
enormous nose, quite eclipsing Cyrano’s in its Gar- 
gantuan dimensions, fascinated him so that the paint- 
ing may have been an impromptu affair. There is 
nothing savory in the subject, unkempt and shabby, 
but there is a residue of pride in the drooping eyes 
under the draggled plume of the battered hat, and 
in the somewhat defiant assurance of the set of the 
head. All this the artist has been swift to seize and 
record in nervous, trenchant line, with firmness and 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 85 


surety of brushwork so that the disdain, compla- 
cency and half-impertinent swagger are set down for 
us with delicate appreciation of texture and color as 
well as a penetrating insight of character. 

A painting by van Goyen introduces us to one of 
the earliest Dutch painters of landscape, one of the 
first, that is, to love landscape for itself and not 
merely as décor for his architecture or background 
for figures. His color is low and subdued, but with 
it he renders the character of his country, big skies, 
low horizon lines, flat expanses with gleams of water 
in pools and streams. A landscape by Philips Koninck 
reveals something of the ambition of the painters of 
our Hudson River school to embrace a vast area in 
a panoramic view. But here in the flat stretches of 
Holland with little diversity of topography the 
effect is monotonous. The attempt to give variety 
by introducing detail destroys the veracity of scale 
unpleasantly. A third landscape by Jan Siberechts, 
a Flemish painter of Antwerp, has much more 
vivacity and a clear, bright color that is far removed 
from the usual low tones or actual monochrome of 
the landscape painter of this period. ‘There is, too, 
a vividness of feeling, as though the emotional reac- 
tion of the pleasant, intimate scene had been recalled 
and set down spontaneously which, with its direct- 
ness of handling, gives it a curiously modern look. 
“Piping Shepherds” is by Aelbert Cuyp, a painter 
who had an unstudied sincerity in recording the nat- 
ural effects that came under his observation, with 
especial power in rendering light and a sort of 


86 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


drowsy, golden atmosphere that bathes his luminous 
canvases. ‘This is evidently an early work with a 
certain touch of naive directness that is not charac- 
teristic of his later paintings. There is a poetic tinge 
about this Dutch pastoral that gives it an individual 
character. The warmth of the sky, the placing of 
the masses of the groups of men and cattle, and the 
refinement of texture show a great advance in land- 
scape painting even with the use of rather lifeless 
conventions of foliage and figures in the detail of 
the landscapes. A “Harbor View” by Willem van 
de Velde, the Younger, is the work of a Dutch 
painter, who, like Van Dyck, became a court painter 
to an English king, in his case the second Charles. 
Van de Velde is famous for his seascapes, usually 
filled with shipping. This canvas shows his power 
of rendering space and his cool, clear color. The 
clouds seem static in the highly polished sky, but the 
vivacity of the drawing of the ships—hulls, masts 
and sails—gives liveliness to the whole work. 

The prodigious still life near-by is by Jan De 
Heem. It belongs to a popular branch of Dutch art 
in the seventeenth century. It shows the Dutch love 
of naturalistic detail, rich color, gleaming surfaces 
and ornate lavishness. The insistent lobster, the 
silver tankard, brass ewer, the fruit and all the elab- 
orate paraphernalia of the setting are painted con 
amore in an orgy of shapes, colors and gleaming high 
lights. It is the sort of magnificence to find a place 
in the luxurious home of some burgher stolid enough 
to gaze unflinchingly at the erubescent lobster and 


YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER JUG. JOHANNES VERMEER 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


p 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 87 


to delight in the florid decorative ensemble. It pos- 
sesses microscopic fidelity and good arrangement, 
but little zsthetic interest. The Biblical subject, 
“Isaac Blessing Jacob,” by van den Eeckhout, reveals 
the closest imitator of Rembrandt among his host of 
followers. It also reveals the futility of attempting 
to walk in the steps of genius. 

In the next room, Gallery 26, there are two por- 
traits by Frans Hals that call for a full stop. They 
are the portraits respectively of “Balthasar Coy- 
mans” and “Dorothea Berck.” The sincerity of the 
portraiture, relying so little on the usual explicitness 
of Dutch portrait painters, may at first conceal the 
brilliancy of the execution, the masterly simplifica- 
tion of form that gives the impression of breadth 
and simplicity. The modeling is accomplished in a 
great measure by the distribution of light and care- 
ful rendering of values. Yet for all this objective 
nicety the artist does not fail to seize the essentials 
of character. 

Some remarkable works by Rembrandt are also 
in this gallery. The “Sybil” shows him nearer to 
the men of his time, perhaps, than his later work. 
He has evidently built on a linear pattern that has 
been lost sight of as the plastic significance of his 
design evolves through these masses of pigment shot 
through with warmth and color. The light concen- 
trates on the face of the girl, giving something dis- 
tinctive and noble to her gesture. “The Philoso- 
pher” and the “Noble Slav” are perhaps too well 
known to need comment. In the golden dusk of 


88 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


these canvases, with its exquisite shading from high 
luminosity to deepest shadows, there are evoked fig- 
ures that have much the effect of sculpture, with an 
added power of revealing the soul and mind of the 
sitter in this strange isolation of other-world light 
and shade. The “Flora” is a late work and quite 
different from his usual manner in its emphasis on 
line and clear-cut contours. 

Pieter de Hooch, whose “Scene in a Courtyard” 
is here, is one of the painters who attained a mastery 
of light, even conquering the problem of the oppos- 
ing effects of indoor and outdoor lighting. His 
work is, however, difficult to judge in this setting, 
for a canvas by Vermeer on each side diverts the eye, 
so that in a later gallery this artist may well receive 
the attention he merits. 

These paintings by Jan Vermeer of Delft are 
two of the treasures of the museum. Both contain 
the single figure of a woman, as indeed the majority 
of his canvases do. Young women occupied quite 
placidly in some ordinary household occupation, but 
invested with a quality of poetic beauty through ~ 
balance of color and mass, refinement of handling 
and a remarkable solution of three-dimensional com- 
position that keeps the whole design rather flat, well 
within the frame and bathed in a luminous silvery 
light. 

In “Young Woman with a Water Jug” Vermeer’s 
method of placing a figure against a series of rec- 
tangles that are the basis of the design is carried out; 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS 89 


one of the rectangles proves to be a wall map which 
echoes the fashion of the day as well as provides 
just the balance needed for the larger masses. The 
whole figure with its clear, white headdress is suf- 
fused in a silvery radiance that does not dissolve the 
solidity of the figure. Throughout the canvas there 
is an exquisite sustained harmony of pale yellow, 
blues and white. The light strikes the figure from 
the side and falls through the room with no contrast 
of violent light and shadow, but a silver serenity per- 
vades and surrounds every object. The technical 
triumph of the work is in itself a thing for pure 
enjoyment, yet it is never obtruded. The elaborate 
pattern with its fresh glowing color and bath of light 
and air is built up carefully with absolute surety and 
scientific knowledge, but the breadth and beauty of 
the whole texture of the design most impress us. 
The other painting, “Lady with a Lute,” glows with 
a golden rather than a silvery radiance, but there is 
here, too, the beauty of matiére in the enameled sur- 
faces of color, and incredible magic in the simplicity 
and sophistication of the audacious and brilliant 
design. 

This gallery also contains landscape paintings by 
later men. Such a painting as “Landscape” by 
Jacob Ruisdael, a large one of stream and rocky 
banks, seems very far from our modern ideas of 
landscape work in its heaviness of tone, its rather 
crowded composition with emphasis given to negli- 
gible detail and much methodical convention in the 


90 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


painting of foliage and trees. Yet there is obvious 
evidence of the artist’s melancholy temperament 
seeking to penetrate the mystery of nature and find 
solace in such communion. This is hardly a repre- 
sentative landscape, for in his best work there is © 
imagination and a grandeur of conception in the 
sweep of his skies and the fine balance of masses. 
Salomon Ruysdael’s “Drawing the Eel” is the older 
idea of landscape with figures, here given vivacity 
and gaiety. Jan van de Cappelle’s “Mouth of the 
Scheldt,” in its monochrome of amber tones, has 
movement in its clouds, buoyancy in their vaporous 
masses that makes them float easily above the flat 
expanse of watery world below. Adriaen van Os- 
tade was a pupil of Frans Hals. His rather mediocre 
talent was devoted to genre pictures of peasant life 
such as the one here, “The Old Fiddler,” executed 
with animation and freedom and a sense of enjoy- 
ment with the life he depicts. He shows surety in 
his technique, but is rather heavy in tone, which even 
his artificial lighting does not always relieve. David 
Teniers the Younger, who far outranks Ostade at 
this sort of thing (that is, when he is at his best), is 
represented by a group of small landscapes in Gal- 
lery 28, and a typical “Marriage Festival” in Gallery 
27. These give an idea of his transparency and 
warmth of coloring as well as his power to paint fig- 
ures effectively even in so huddled a composition as 
this. A painting of “Interior of a Church” by Anton 
de Lorme (the figures are by Terborch) is another 


THE NORTHERN SCHOOLS gI 


form of art that late Dutch painters developed, that 
is, architectural subjects, not only the pleasing red 
roofs and warm tones of brick of their domestic ar- 
chitecture, but such lofty interiors as this of Gothic 
churches, either with figures or empty and stately, 
with effects of high illumination and deep shadow. 


CHAPTER SIX 


SPANISH PAINTING 


OR a moment we turn back to Gallery 29 of 

Spanish paintings. Two of the great names 

are here—E] Greco and Goya. For Velazquez we 

must wait with the exception of a fine loan canvas, 

“Queen Mariana,” until we reach the Altman Col- — 

lection. Zurbaran, a contemporary of Velazquez, is 
represented by two canvases. 

Primitive Spanish art, religious in theme, had 
plenty of hard, bright color with carving and gilding 
to set it off, but later it became somber in keeping 
with its harsh, ascetic flavor. -In the main the Span- 
ish artist borrowed more than he invented, turning 
first to the Netherlands and later to Italy. The 
Italianate “Lucretia,” by Ribera, in this gallery indi- 
cates the later fashion, although it does not show 
Ribera at his best. 

El Greco, a Greek as his name indicates, was a 
native of Crete. At an early age he went to Venice 
to study art, later arriving in Spain where he found 
an intensity of religious fervor suited to his tempera- 
ment. Though a foreigner, he found Spain so con- 
genial that he is said to have been more Spanish 
than the Spaniards. The “Nativity” in this gallery 
recalls similar themes in the Northern schools and 
also suggests a great contrast in attitude and han- 

92 


SPANISH PAINTING 93 


dling. The love of naturalistic detail and ornament 
so characteristic of the North is not here, nor the bal- 
ance and proportion of Renaissance art, rather the 
setting and detail are sacrificed to a vehemence of 
movement that sweeps through the whole canvas and 
beats in an ecstasy of religious exaltation. El Greco’s 
forms have often been compared to flames in their 
surging toss of movement and exaggerated elonga- 
tion, both of rippling draperies and of limbs. The 
architectural background is only suggested—it looms 
out of a strange ashen radiance woven with wavering 
shadows and tremulous flashes of brilliance into an 
unearthly sort of chiaroscuro in which reality is dis- 
solved and forms flicker and waver as though caught 
in a gust of wind. Everything irradiates from the 
Child: the emotion of adoration and worship beats 
through the whole canvas, swaying the ecstatic lam- 
bent figures to its pulse of rhythm. Although the 
color is rather dimmed, there is still the opposition of 
wine reds with deep blues set off by murky blacks and 
dingy whites to indicate how much of the vibrancy 
and vigor of effect was due to subtlety of color as 
well as to design. There is much to remind us of 
modern work. Perhaps the first impression of this 
exaggerated, vehement work is modern, because of 
the juxtaposition of patches of color in a sort of im- 
pressionistic manner and the geometrical three-di- 
mensional design. But the creative invention and 
power of vital unified design is more profound than 
these obvious manipulations. Stand and analyze the 
work, and you find how marvelously the exaggera- 


94 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


tion of design has been sensitively organized to pro- 
duce this impression of life and movement through- 
out the painting and how harmoniously the big 
rhythms sweep up the extravagant gesture and sharp 
diagonals into an eloquent unity of impression. 

The portrait that hangs near this group is sup- 
posed to be of El Greco, himself, but it is not repre- 
sentative of his power in portraiture, rather is diluted 
and uncertain in its effect. The “Holy Family,” in 
Gallery 36, which we have already penetrated to 
gaze at other works, is a fine example of the artist’s — 
period when his design was more compact, and his 
palette became distinctly personal. 

The paintings of Goya shown in this gallery only 
indicate certain phases of his remarkable scope. To 
gain any idea of the tremendous range of his work 
one should study his prints. The painting of the 
“Bull Fight” shows his audacity in contrast to the 
polite conventions of his day. It also shows him 
as a modern, ahead of his time and anticipating much 
of the methods of later Frenchmen in his use of 
color, his realism, his power to give the feel of 
place, the beat of the sun, the choke of the clouds 
of dust and the excitement of the spectators. The 
composition is peculiar in its sharp division into two 
halves by the arrangement of the double arena, 
which is said to have been an ordinary device. But 
it is not difficult to see how his winding scarf of col- 
orful figures holds the sectors together. Goya is 
supposed to have entered the bull ring at one time, 
and was always fascinated by its fierce, violent drama. 


DEB eNATIVIFTY. “EL. GRECO 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


SPANISH PAINTING 95 


In his early work he departed from tradition not only 
in using contemporary material, but in his almost 
ferocious attack, his intensity of color contrasts and 
his audacity of design; later, however, he modified 
his palette and used more restraint. In the portrait 
of “Don Sebastian Martinez,” his early dramatic 
impressionistic treatment is subdued to this almost 
austere, simple handling with transparent under- 
painting, giving its color scheme of silvery grays 
and steel blues great luminosity. Yet for all its 
precision and quiet handling there is in this portrait 
vivacity and life, there is subtlety in its seizing of 
character and soundness in its modeling. The por- 
trait of “Don Tiburcio Perez” is a marvelous record 
of objective fact in execution, surety and liveliness 
of characterization so that the figure firmly set 
against the illumination of the canvas has solidity 
and life, a bodily gesture that confirms the vivacious 
glance of the eyes and the handsome, rather sensu- 
ous face. 

It is, unfortunately, impossible to consider other 
phases of Goya here—his satire, his terrific fury of 
turbulent attack upon the political abuses of his day, 
his idyllic charm of design for tapestry that links 
him to Watteau, his diabolical fancies of witches and 
unholy revels in his “Caprices,” or his grim record 
of the French invasion and its attendant horrors in 
“Disasters of War.” But it is possible to feel that 
he was thoroughly Spanish, however much he owed 
to other men—Ribera, Tiepolo, Bassano, or Tinto- 
retto—or that with all his vehemence and passion he 


96 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


is able to concentrate upon design with depth of ar- 
tistic penetration and knowledge. 

Zurbaran, who in point of time precedes Goya, 
has the old austerity of the Spanish artist, which 
some one has summed up as a “passion for reality 
with aspiration to the ideal.” This “Battle with the 
Moors,” painted for a Carthusian Monastery, shows 
the Virgin and Child seated high on golden clouds 
looking down upon a clearing in the forest where 
there is a battle raging between Moorish cavalry © 
and Spanish soldiers. Pikeman are entering the bat- 
tle in the foreground. One more than life-sized fig- 
ure of a cavalier turns toward the spectator as though 
about to lean out of the frame as he points towards 
the combat. In the green tone of this canvas, its 
harsh realism and its ascetic note, there 1s the reflec- 
tion of the Spain of the Inquisition. It is a church 
militant, which crushes the unbeliever ruthlessly, 
that one feels exalted in this fierce, stark present- 
ment. The composition is both curious and effective 
with its thrust of spears across the canvas and its 
wan flashes of light. In quite another mood is his 
“Young Virgin,” probably one of the series of por- 
traits of young Sevillian girls endowed with a quasi- 
saintliness of attitude. Everything concentrates on 
the round white face of the girl seated so primly 
at her embroidery, a formal pattern of flowers 
strewing the foreground. ‘The warm orange-red 
of the draperies symmetrically looped behind the 
demure figure is a note often found on Velazquez’s 
early palette. The insipidity of the rendering with 


SPANISH PAINTING 97 


its sentimental pretense of religion is a far cry from 
the fierce devotion of the other painting. 

Murillo, represented here only by a pretentious 
portrait * handled in an insensitive manner, turned 
the religious passion of Spain to sentimental account 
with his use of provincial types and picturesque set- 
tings for sacred legend. He attained immense pop- 
ularity by his facile, eloquent interpretation of 
religious subjects, often reaching great harmony of 
color but seldom rising to any greatness of imagina- 
tion or distinction of technical execution. 


* The museum has acquired the portrait of “Don Andres de 
Andrade y Col,” by Murillo; a vigorous work, since this book went 
to press. 


CHAPTER SEVEN 


BRITISH PAINTING 


ASSING again through the galleries of Flemish 

and Dutch art, we reach Gallery 24, British 

art. It seems a natural transition, for the Dutch 
counted most in the early development of British 
art, concerned as it was with portraiture and land- 
scape painting. This development took place in the 
eighteenth century when European art was passing 
through a period of decadence and decline with the 
waning of the Italian influence. The early decora- 
tive impulse that produced such beautiful work in 
the illuminated missals of Ireland died out when 
the Flemish and French influences began to cross the 
channel in the fifteenth century. When the Renais- 
sance came to England it found no body of local art 
or tradition of painting to quicken into new life, as 
it did in France, Germany or the Netherlands. The 
reaction in England was mainly literary, developing 
great prose and poetry rather than pictorial expres- 
sion. There are, of course, traces of church paint- 
ings, altar-pieces and frescoes, that indicate the 
religious decoration of the medizval period. But it 
was not a widely practiced art. During the fifteenth, 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries foreign painters 
were welcomed in England to paint the portraits of 

98 


BRITISH PAINTING 99 


the great and furnish the palaces and country houses 
with their works. 

William Hogarth is often called the first English 
painter, for his art is unmistakably English, tinged 
with the atmosphere of his surroundings and the 
psychology of his day. Hogarth was first appren- 
ticed to an engraver and even after he turned to 
painting continued his engraving. The meticulous 
finish, the care for detail, that mark his genre pieces, 
reveal his early training of eye and hand. But he 
was essentially a painter and a gifted one in his easy 
handling, his power of enveloping his work in at- 
mosphere, his feeling for values and his color. Yet, 
because of the didactic, satirical character of his 
famous genre paintings, with their scathing arraign- 
ment of contemporary morals, Hogarth’s art was not 
regarded so highly in his day as was his sermonizing. 
English art is seldom entirely free from a literary 
background so that its appeal is often a confused one. 
In the case of Hogarth, the story-telling idea for a 
long time obscured the real genius of the artist, as 
far as the public was concerned. His two paintings 
in this gallery are portraits, the sort of elaborate 
family group with pretentious setting that were in 
vogue at this period. “The Price Family,” an early 
work, shows the artist still burdened with many of 
the prevalent conventions of gesture and style, yet 
in the easy arrangement of the rather formidable 
group and the liveliness of the presentment his 
originality and artistic endowment are evident. One 
feels a neat little tweak of satire, too, in this and in 


100 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


the portrait of the “Jeffreys Family,” as though all 
these rather pompous, self-satisfied persons had no 
defense against this keen observer of men and man- 
ners. Later, in Gallery 14, we are to see Hogarth’s 
portrait of “Peg Woffington.” It will probably ap- 
pear surprisingly familiar to you, even if you have 
never looked at it before, because so many of our 
early American portrait painters were greatly in- 
fluenced by Hogarth’s work and in many cases imi- 
tated it quite obviously. In this painting it is possible 
to realize what a fine colorist Hogarth was and how 
good a draughtsman. 

Sir Joshua Reynolds was a dominating figure of 
the artistic world of the eighteenth century in Eng- 
land. Van Dyck had been dead a hundred years 
when this young artist got to work (he was first to 
be an apothecary ), yet how much of Van Dyck there 
is in Reynolds! When a young man he visited Italy 
and studied the Italian painters evolving, from the 
best he found in the great masters, a system of art 
procedure to govern all painting. One of his pupils 
said of him, “No one ever appropriated the ideas of 
others to his own purpose with more skill than Sir 
Joshua.” His work shows a careful sifting out and 
rearrangement of the material thus appropriated. 
The fact that this material was drawn from allegori- 
cal or historical paintings carried out on a large dec- 
orative scale, did not deter him from applying their 
esthetic principles to portrait painting. Later he 
expounded his system to the students of the Royal 
Academy, so that there is no doubt of his artistic 


jApy fo wnasnpy unjyodosja py 


SCIONADN VOHSOL IS 
‘MIVId SHINVHD AGNV SANOL ODINI ‘SNVIGNYVOND SIH HLIM ANVA AUNAH ‘NOH 


BRITISH PAINTING 101 


convictions. He believed in the grand style, in fol- 
lowing the antique, in rejecting naturalism and 
avoiding “impolite,” that is, original painting, and 
above all in basing the whole work of the artist on 
a definite body of classical precedent. His own work 
falls far short at times of illustrating all these sound 
principles, he was never a good draughtsman, his 
color was often trite, and there is no spontaneity in 
his learned work; but, he knew how to get a good 
likeness and give his sitters the suavity and ele- 
gance the times demanded. He is usually happy in 
his portraits of children, such as the delightful 
“Georgiana Augusta Frederica Elliott,? and the 
little girls who hold up their baby brother so pre- 
cariously in the portrait of “Lady Smith and Her 
Children.” Unfortunately he found this vein too 
rich in ore and worked it out to a thinness of senti- 
ment and weakness appalling in some of his simper- 
ing misses. Although Reynolds is often thought of 
as a painter preéminently successful in the portraits 
of aristocratic ladies, such as this “Lady Smith,” 
set in her fair pensiveness against a backdrop of land- 
scape, he is particularly felicitous in representing the 
English gentleman—giving him an air of someone 
to the manner born with a serious distinction that 
makes itself felt as an essential quality of the sit- 
ter. The “Sir George Coussmaker,” or the “Hon. 
Henry Fane with His Guardians,” well illustrates 
this ability to present the cultivated, dignified Brit- 
ish gentleman of his day quite as serenely aristocratic 
and assured as the cavalier of Van Dyck’s portraits. 


102 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES > 


In Gainsborough, whose “Mrs. Grace Dal- 
rymple Elliott” is here (she is the mother of the 
“Georgiana,” by Reynolds), we find an artist who 
had no schooling and no interest in acquiring it. He 
was obliged to paint portraits to gain a living, but his 
real joy was in landscape painting. He, himself, 
confesses that he often works a “landskip” into the 
background of a portrait in pure delight in the work. 
From this portrait of Mrs. Elliott, we may see the 
artist’s feeling for decoration, his taste, and his artis- 
tic discernment. It is the work of an artist who feels 
an inner compulsion to creative expression, rather 
than to discreet pursuit of academic formule. The 
draughtsmanship is far from impeccable in this 
painting, and there is something a little odd in the 
placing of the figure, yet what appeal lies in the 
simplicity and directness of the work, in the precision 
and delicacy of its handling! The rendering of the 
yellow satin overdress against the soft tints of the 
flesh and the ivory tones of the flowing satin skirt 
is refinement itself. The restricted color scheme 
seems to emphasize the life and vigor in the figure 
and the vitality of the presentment. The charm and 
grace of the lady are, no doubt, partly hers in her 
own right, but also they spring from the personality 
of the artist who invested every subject with the 
poetry and sensibility of his own nature. The land- 
scape background is no perfunctory muse en scéne, 
but a glimpse of lovely countryside sympathetically 
portrayed. Without ever aspiring to the grand style 
that so intrigued Reynolds, Gainsborough is more 


BRITISH PAINTING 103 


fastidious. The small portrait of “The Painter’s 
Daughter, Margaret,”’ showing the head and shoul- 
ders of a young girl with posies in her hair and a 
flush of youth, is probably a study for the larger 
painting of both daughters. It recalls the happy 
family life of the artist, filled with music, friends 
and delight in natural beauty—a harmonious life 
unspoiled by success and depending more on the re- 
sources of a rich nature than on any gifts of fortune. 

Romney had a gift for the pictorial; he seized 
the possibility of a picture in every sitter with grace 
and good taste. His self-portrait here is vigorous 
and forcible although unfinished. It is in the por- 
trait of “Mrs. Fitzherbert?? (whose marriage to 
George IV, when he was Prince of Wales, brought 
many political and religious complications but no 
throne for the lady), that the real talent of the 
artist is shown—the gift of revealing a quality of 
exquisite femininity with graceful line and felicities 
of color. The portrait of Lady Hamilton as 
“Daphne,” in Gallery 14, is a vivacious study of this 
fascinating woman who furnished much of the in- 
spiration of Romney’s work. There is nothing of 
Daphne in the conception, to be sure, but the artist 
painted this sitter so many times that he had to play 
variants on the theme. 

Lawrence is represented here by a number of 
paintings, none more popular than “The Calmady 
Children,” a portrait which the artist himself is re- 
ported to have considered highly. This has been 
engraved many times. It was called “Nature,” in 


104 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


the stilted sentiment of the day, by the engraver who 
wished it to be a best seller, as it proved to be. The 
work is a decorative composition in its space-filling 
and skilful linear pattern. It seems a little too 
sparkling, perhaps, a trifle forced in its cleverness 
and brilliance. Much more serious as a work of art 
is the portrait of the “Rev. William Pennicott,” de- 
veloped with greater reserve and sincerity. The 
head is well defined so that there is a sense of mass 
and weight, while the characterization harmonizes 
with the dignity and poise of the bodily gesture. 
The brilliancy and facility of Lawrence’s per- 
formance unfortunately degenerated into superficial 
work before he was thirty, so that his portraits are 
extremely uneven in their value. 

Beechey, whose tremendous “Duke of York” is 
in this gallery, is at his best a pleasing painter, har- 
monious in color and thoroughly competent. Much 
better than this inflated, rather dull presentment of 
royalty is the “Portrait of a Lady” in Gallery 14, 
to which we must refer for many of the English 
painters. 

Hoppner is here, too, florid sentiment and rather 
opulent charms of flesh shown in his solid lady and 
her solid infants—“Mrs. Gardiner and Her Chil- 
dren.” His painting of whites held boldly against 
each other and the warm flesh tones is worth noting. — 
Lely, is also represented here to remind us of how 
long foreigners reaped the rewards of fashionable 
portraiture in England. 


Tit CALMADY CHILDREN. SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE 


. Metropolitan Museum of Art 


BRITISH PAINTING 105 


“Hautbois Common” by John Crome, or Old 
Crome, brings us to the beginning of English land- 
scape painting, since there is no canvas by Richard 
Wilson in this group. Crome shows Dutch influence 
and rch of Wilson, too, but most of all he is him- 
self, highly individual-mannered artist with so- 
lidity and power in his work. He is one of the first 
of the English landscape painters to use a personal 
idiom in his interpretation of nature. His trees are 
still brown, to be sure, but there is light and air 
throughout this little canvas with its pattern of sun- 
shine and feeling of mass in the cluster of trees 
against the pale sky. He studied nature at first- 
hand and gave a feeling of bigness to his simple 
compositions, while in such work as “Mousehold 
Heath,” in the National Gallery, London, there is 
a bath of golden atmosphere that envelops the 
whole scene. He drew around him a group of paint- 
ers in the so-called Norwich School. 

“Glebe Farm,” by Constable, turns over a new 
leaf and a new chapter, for with Constable we come 
to modern landscape painting. He paints a country 
he knows and loves with sensitive feeling for its 
color and atmospheric effects. ‘The accepted conven- 
tions of artificial grandeur and stateliness still in 
vogue, which made it imperative to build up a land- 
scape of bits of classic detail into an accepted archi- 
tectural design, has no place here in this simple 
transcription of valley, village and hill. The vil- 
lage-church spire replaces the classic ruin, and the 


106 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


greens and blues of nature take the place of the pic- 
torial convention of browns, grays and ambers that 
had come to represent color in landscape. 

The blue sky with its big clouds that break in their 
drifting to let shafts of wan radiance fall in flecks 
of light between the leaves of the spreading trees, 
(“Constable’s snow,” as it was derisively called by 
his detractors), the moist atmosphere that envelops 
the scene, the bright hues of the damp turf, are all 
a heresy which was to found a new faith. It is an 
intimate scene, an observed mood of nature, with 
its rustling of leaves and movement of clouds, its 
gleam of flowing water. It is easy to see how closely 
it derives from the Dutch painters, but it is also easy 
to feel the difference of attitude from the Dutch re- 
cording of objective fact. Here is the new subjec- 
tive note, the personal reaction that is, in some de- 
gree, to color all modern landscape painting. More- 
over when you look at these lively greens, you see 
that they are composed of many notes of green 
placed closely together. Constable, in this division 
of tone to gain greater intensity of light and color, 
is the first of the impressionists. It was the glowing 
warmth and wash of air in his “Haywain,” exhibited 
at Paris, that gave inspiration to the French artists in 
their research for light and color. 

A very blue sky and sea with a stretch of yellow 
beach, on which the figures are secondary in im- 
portance, is by Bonington. It is handled broadly, 
and indicates how much this young Englishman had 
absorbed both of Venetian color and the theories of 


BRITISH PAINTING 107 


the French painter, Delacroix. He did not live long 
enough to prove what his early promise merited. 
“Saltash,” by J. M. W. Turner, brings us to a 
man who had a most ardent press agent in Ruskin, 
who devoted volumes to expounding Turner’s art, 
never praising it for its real qualities, but rather com- 
mending it for virtues which it did not have at all. 
This early canvas has a somberness which we do not 
associate with Turner’s work, but it is a serious able 
work, for all its browns. It has the strength, the 
solidity and structural dignity that were later sacri- 
ficed to capricious handling and arbitrary exaggera- 
tion. Across the room is “The Grand Canal, 
Venice,” a decided contrast in its opulence of color, 
its sketchy handling and attempted improvement on 
nature. It marks his middle period, while the 
“Whale Ship” shows his final development. This 
work is the quintessence of the theatrical—a vast 
melodramatic setting of nature in which the great 
leviathan and the ship are phantoms suspended for 
a moment in a strange welter of sky and sea, in which 
mystery is the keynote, and weird, prismatic illu- 
mination breaking through this swirl of spray and 
mist reaches an mth degree. The painting has, 
doubtless, lost its first opalescence of color, as much 
of Turner’s pigment has, but in its unearthly splen- 
dor, its magic of sea and sky, its symbolism of the 
struggle of man with the titanic forces of nature, it 
reveals much of this artist’s power. Yet this is 
the painter Ruskin extols as giving accurate tran- 
scriptions of natural forms and careful nicety to his 


108 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES | 


work! How much Turner really was a student of 
nature one may see in this room—his water-colors 
convey a better impression of his ability to use pure 
color veraciously, with facility of technique and feel- 
ing for composition. It is impossible to know much 
of so many-sided a painter as Turner, gifted and 
arbitrary, with something of the showman in his 
desire to go someone better in each phase of his 
work, but it is not difficult to realize how much his 
paintings of diffused light and his luminism were 
borrowed from by later men. ~ However grandilo- 
quent he became, however exaggerated in his forcing 
of light, his translucency of color and his dissolving 
of solid forms in a beating, incandescent flood of 
radiance solved for the luminists many problems 
that they might long have struggled with deprived 
of his aid. 

Making a detour to reach Gallery 14, other paint- 
ings of the British school are found in the European 
collection of George A. Hearn. Here is a delicious 
version of childhood in “Master Hare,” by Rey- 
nolds; a fine Lawrence, in the portrait of “Lady 
Ellenborough”; a “Lady with a Coral Necklace” 
by Hoppner which, though not a great technical per- 
formance, is yet full of blandishments of rosy notes. 
The landscape by Gainsborough shows his trans- 
parency of lighting, the sensuous beauty of his land- 
scape with his direct, spontaneous rendering and 
many curious mannerisms of brushwork. This is 
something seen and loved and impulsively given back 
to us with the emotion of its first delight. Its highly 


BRITISH PAINTING 109 


personal character reflects the poetic nature of the 
painter—an interpretation of nature as seen through 
sensitive eyes and rendered with grace and freedom. 
The landscapes by Wilson are important canvases, 
since they are the museum’s only examples of work 
by the first of the English painters of landscape. 
Like many another of his day Wilson began as a 
portrait painter, but he abandoned this work for his 
ruling passion, the art of painting nature—then the 
most unfashionable and unprofitable of arts. It is 
recorded that Gainsborough himself hung land- 
scapes in the hall where his patrons passed so that 
they might be induced to buy one. Wilson tried no 
such expedient, but departed to Italy where he be- 
came a mannered classical painter, much as the Ital- 
ianized Claude Lorraine. But subject matter is 
negligible in his work, since his interest was in the 
absorption of light by shadow, the diffusion of sil- 
very light, the weight of moisture-laden clouds and 
the depth of recession of his atmospheric effects. 
From these canvases one cannot judge his full 
powers of handling of the beauty of his graceful 
line. Yet you may see how far removed it is, for all 
its outworn paraphernalia of décor, from the stufh- 
ness and somberness of contemporary landscape 
painting. It is not difficult to realize why Wilson 
was called the “father of English landscape.” 
George Morland is represented here by a char- 
acteristic work, “The Midday Meal”—a man carry- 
ing food to a pig pen with pigs following him—not 
an elevated subject, but carried out in a thoroughly 


110 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


original way with fluency and delightful color. 
Morland, whose reputation as a ne’er-do-well has. 
been carefully handed down to us, follows some- 
thing of the manner of Dutch genre painting, but 
develops both his brushwork and his subject in his 
own way. His work is familiar through the many 
color prints made from his sentimental themes. 

The portrait of “Henry Forsyth,” by Raeburn, 
shows the artist at a high point he did not always 
reach. It is carried out in the manner of Hals—in 
its balance of light and dark masses and beauty of 
fused tones. The lack of elaborate setting concen- 
trates on the solidity of the painting, the careful 
definition of the planes and the subtlety of the mod- 
eling. It is a fine portrait. Here are also works 
by artists of the Norwich School, founded by Crome, 
two luminous ones by Cotman, a landscape by Crome 
himself, and the beautiful “Stour Bridge” by Con- 
stable, which in many ways seems all that one can 
ask for in a landscape. 

The painting by de Hooch, though not British, 
cannot be missed. Here it does not have to con- 
tend with a Vermeer on each side for its appreciation. 
The problem of opposing lights—the outdoor sun- 
light and the indoor lighting—is here solved with a 
fine harmony. The richness of the coloring, low in 
key, and the beauty of the surfaces delight one. 
There is a pleasing, unctuous, tactile charm through- 
out the canvas. 


CHAPTER EIGHT 


FRENCH PAINTING 


HE beginnings of French art cannot be studied 
in the museum, for the only actual primitive 
is “Martyrdom of Two Saints,” of the school of 
Marmion, painted probably toward the close of the 
fifteenth century under decided Flemish influence. 
This double painting is to be found in the Dreicer 
Collection, Gallery 36. The important thing is to 
keep in mind that there was a French school of art 
before the Renaissance, which combined the fused 
elements of its civilization—Celtic, Gallic, Greek 
(in the South), Roman, German—as well as the 
outside influences, such as the Byzantine brought 
in by Charlemagne. It is differentiated from other 
work of the same period in certain obvious charac- 
teristics, such as its early emancipation from Byzan- 
tine formalism, its power of composition, and its 
taste. The decorative feeling is especially apparent 
in all the early missals, illuminations, church fur- 
nishings, stained glass and tapestries. On viewing 
this work there always arises the fascinating specula- 
tion as to the character this highly developed art 
would have finally reached, had not the Italian 
Renaissance diverted it from its natural growth. 
The Renaissance was ushered in by Francis I, 


who brought Italian artists to decorate his palace at 
Iif 


112 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


Fontainebleau. But there was a sturdy native art 
beside the imported one, for the school of Clouet 
was also flourishing, producing remarkable por- 
traiture. An example of sixteenth-century painting, 
of this school is also in Gallery 36, a portrait of 
Francis I, himself. It is much like Holbein’s work, 
as is the pendent portrait of Eleanor of Austria, at- 
tributed to Mabuse. Eleanor’s second husband was 
Francis I. As we have already noted, a portrait of 
her by Holbein is at Hampton Court. It is thought 
that Francois Clouet, was at one time a pupil of 
Holbein, so the interesting question of influences and 
contacts may be traced even in these few works. 
Two exquisite portraits by Corneille de Lyon, who 
painted the court of Henri II, are in this same gal- 
lery. They show the characteristic pale green back- 
ground, transparency of painting and refinement of 
work that characterized this painter, while also pre- 
senting a vigorous handling and remarkable realism. 

In the first room of French paintings, Gallery 20- 
A—we come into the grand siécle, when the author- 
ity of Louis XIV imposed itself upon every activity 
of French life and art became officialized by the es- 
tablishment of the Royal Academy of Painting and 
Sculpture, eminently warranted, no doubt, by the 
example of the Académie Francaise, which was dis- 
ciplining French literature. The court painters of 
the time are represented here by Nicolas de Largil- 
ligre, who actually flourished for sixty years, living 
and painting into the reign of Louis XV. The two 
florid portraits here of the “Baron and Baroness de 


FRENCH PAINTING 113 


Prangins” are in the taste of the time, with all the 
grandeur of costume and setting that even so osten- 
tatious a period demanded. Yet for all this efflores- 
cence of satins and jewels, of flowers and ornate de- 
tail, you realize how well it is all painted and with 
what sincerity and vitality it is carried out. 

Something of the grandiose flavor of the age is 
brought to us in the small allegorical canvas of 
“Venus and Sea Nymphs,” by Coypel. This painter 
assisted in the decoration of the new palace of Ver- 
sailles, that rose from a sandy waste at the wave of 
the king’s scepter—at least when he waved it at 
architects, painters, and sculptors. 

Quite in contrast to this period, or, in fact, to any 
epoch of French art, is the “Mendicants,” by the 
Brothers Le Nain—a genre painting concerned with 
professional beggars and their patrons, with no trace 
of sentimentality, but with a sober realism and aus- 
terity that is intensified by the low key of the paint- 
ing. Little is known of these three brothers, except 
that one did miniatures, one executed portrait sculp- 
ture, and all three collaborated in this type of sub- 
ject, which has more rapport with Holland than with 
France. It is to the credit of the newly formed 
Academy and to its head, Louis the Magnificent, 
that for all their homely subject matter the three 
brothers were elected members of the Academy, and 
Mathieu was appointed official painter of the little 
town of Laon, their birthplace. They seem to have 
been little affected by the artists of their day, or in 
turn to have had any influence on other painters of 


114 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


the time. They were realists, soberly working at a 
moment of artificiality and exaggeration. 

The great figure of Nicolas Poussin belongs to 
this period. Because of his subject matter and style, 
as well as his life in Italy, he may seem more Italian 
than French. Yet there is always the background of — 
French tradition to reckon with. Also there is the 
important fact of his Flemish ancestry to be recalled — 
in any consideration of his artistic endowment. Had 
he remained in France and not escaped from the all- 
penetrating rays of Louis le Saleil, his genius doubt- 
less would have been sacrificed in a large measure 
to the further illumination of this radiant monarch. 
Poussin was able to develop his gifts in conformity 
with his own nature. In Italy he studied the work 
of Raphael, copying, we are told, prints of his pic- 
tures to teach himself drawing. He also studied the 
antique, probably mostly from bas-reliefs. Look- 
ing into his own nature he found a real love of land- 
scape that nothing formal or pedantic could stifle. 
From Raphael, from classical sculpture, from his — 
love of nature, he formulated the academic, classical 
style of French art. We recognized at the opening 
of this chapter that the French have as a race many 
strains subtly blended. One of them is, of course, 
Roman, and the precision, the almost frigid order- 
liness of much of French painting and writing 
springs from this side of the national character. In 
Poussin it accounts for his power of systematic or- 
ganization of principles into a coherent, working 
plan, on which his procedure is founded. The logic, 


FRENCH PAINTING 115 


the order, the adaptation of his various sources of in- 
spiration, all show this inheritance. In his paintings 
he created an ideal world, an Arcadia where there 
was no struggle or suffering, no harshness of climate, 
no rigorous labor—an idyllic beauty of landscape and 
heroic beings, harmonious, exalted, entirely removed 
from our ordinary human experience. But because 
there is something of the classic in his own nature, 
something even of the real Greek tradition of beauty 
and serenity, this Arcadia is not stilted and trivial; 
rather is it a noble conception haunted with a melan- 
choly of the presence of a great past. 

The classical figures, the idealized scenes, and the 
grand style of -Poussin’s works became, for the 
Academy, a sort of measuring rod for determining 
the merit of all paintings, but for us to-day the 
beauty of his landscapes and the nobility of his con- 
ceptions are of greatest interest. In “The Blind 
Orion Searching for the Rising Sun,” the giant 
gropes toward the first rays of morning light guided 
by a workman of Hephestus clinging to his mighty 
head, while the yokels of the countryside gaze at his 
Brobdingnagian proportions in amazement. It is not 
so much an illustration of an old myth as a dramatic 
rendering of it. The harmony of the landscape and 
the figures is the particular gift of Poussin; the bal- 
ance of line and mass, and the architectonics of the 
design with its flat planes giving such recession, re- 
mind us of Raphael. The shadowy mystery of the 
morning, the tinge of light on the clouds, the rich 
greens of the foliage, the receding plain and hill, 


116 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


show close observation of nature at first hand, with 
sensitiveness to subtle effects. Color, never too 
good, has probably deteriorated, as in so much of this 
painter’s work, but there is in it a timeless beauty, 
an abstract perfection, a translation of classical an- 
tiquity into a new tongue with pure accents of serene 
beauty. 

In “St. Peter and St. John Healing the Lame 
Man,” there is much more of Raphael, particularly 
in the obvious geometrical composition and in the 
figures. The color is warmer and functions more 
clearly in building up form, but the artificiality of 
the group leaves much less pleasing an impression 
than the theme in which the landscape and figures 
form a harmonious whole. 

The other great figure of this period, also an 
Italianized Frenchman, was Claude Gellée, or 
Claude Lorraine. In his work the landscape is more 
important than the figures. He, too, became imbued 
with classical lore in Italy. But he studied nature 
directly, and has left a large collection of drawings 
that show us how much he was interested in the 
shapes and contours of natural forms. He did not, 
of course, paint directly from nature, a procedure 
quite out of rapport with classical tenets, but he 
was the first to study effects of atmosphere and light, 
filling his landscapes with a tranquil radiance and 
breaking up the planes of light skilfully in his tre- 
mendous vistas. His compositions are built up of 
bits of classic formule. Roman ruins, Italian scen- 
ery and architectural detail are fitted cleverly to- 


FRENCH PAINTING 117 


gether into a panoramic grandeur often on the 
simplest of linear designs. ‘David at the Cave of 
Adullam” is less typical, because of the emphasis on 
figures—which he drew badly in a would-be Raph- 
aelesque manner—than “A Seaport,” of Gallery 14 
which, if not actually by Claude, is probably a copy 
of one of his paintings. Here can be seen how he has 
built up an idealized landscape, a sort of improve- 
ment on nature in its splendor and magnificence. 
This heroic, incredible scene derives a calm beauty 
from the balance of its tonal masses, a bigness of 
structure that gives breadth to a canvas filled with an 
almost wearying excess of hard, tight detail. If it 
is an entirely artificial scene assembled from a vast 
storehouse of classic material, yet it reflects an inner 
significance of antiquity like an echo of Virgil. 
Nothing in its array of detail is really veracious or 
vital, yet the effect of the whole is of serenity and 
stately simplicity. 

With Boucher’s “Toilet of Venus,” we arrive-at 
the next fashion of painting that came in with the 
Regency and expanded still further under Louis 
XV. Itis an echo of the artificial, pleasure-mad age 
for which it was painted, the grand manner of Louis 
XIV giving way to affectation and extravagance. 
The great figure of Watteau, who introduced the 
type of subject that became the mode of the time, 
cannot be studied in these galleries. He introduced 
the fétes galantes and charming pastorals that de- 
lighted the jaded courtiers, but more than all he 
Was a great painter whose influence did much for 


118 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


both French and English landscape painting. 
Boucher is a lesser figure, but in this painting 
one must realize how good a draughtsman and de- 
signer he is, with his graceful line and decorative 
balance of color. In this work his brushwork is 
fluent, but too often the pressure of his enormous 
output impaired its execution. Here he sets the 
flesh tones of the nude figure against all this heaped- 
up opulence of draperies, jewels, gold dishes and 
rustling stuffs with fine feeling for color pattern and 
space filling. In the Pierpont Morgan Wing, several 
galleries are devoted to French decorative arts of 
the Regency and of Louis XV, in which one realizes 
the exquisite fitness of Boucher’s decorative panels 
to the milieu for which they were destined. Here, 
isolated from its setting, it is difficult to judge the 
work properly. | 

The name of Fragonard belongs to this period. 
He was a master of color and technique, but, alas! 
cannot be studied here. Chardin is another impor- 
tant artist of the period, who, however, did not 
choose amorini and rosebuds or graceful nymphs, but 
drew. his subject matter from the everyday life that 
surrounded him in his humble bourgeois existence. 
His sober, realistic art shows him a man of exquisite 
artistic sensibility. He was also a marvelous colorist, 
anticipating many of the later impressionistic prac- 
tices. ‘Preparations for a Breakfast, which hangs 
here, illustrates his typical subjects, but not his 
genius; while the figure painting of a “Young 
Woman Knitting” must, if his, belong to a period 


FRENCH PAINTING 11g 


before his powers had matured. Greuze, in his 
“(CHufs Cassés,” represents a phase of the affectation 
and sentimentality of the day. His saccharine sub- 
jects are drawn from lowly life, but with no sincerity 
or directness; rather are they superficial theatrical 
works which are pervaded with artistic tricks. 

With Nattier, we come to one of the portrait 
painters of the court, and an able one. The por- 
trait of the “Princesse de Condé as Diana” with its 
ostentation of classic setting shows how decorative 
his paintings were, how pleasing his color. The rhet- 
oric of the figure belongs to the rococo period in 
which it was painted, but the effective disposition of 
the color surfaces and the grace of the arrangement 
are individual assets of the gifted painter. Drouais 
and André Aved, both represented here, are lesser 
figures of the same type, who followed Nattier’s 
“magical” style as well as their powers permitted. 

On the wall opposite is a beguiling portrait, “Mlle. 
Charlotte du Val d’Ognes,” by David, an artist who 
did not want to be considered a portrait painter at 
all. Yet it is his portraits, such as those of the Bona- 
parte family or the famous one of Madame Ré- 
camier, that interest us to-day, while his frozen, 
classical paintings, which he considered his master- 
pieces, impress us as lifeless allegories, cold in color 
and insipid in sentiment. Yet David is the epitome 
of his time, the very embodiment of its psychology, 
as few artists have been. He marks the transition 
period between the reign of Louis XV and the Revo- 
lutionary upheaval, when the reaction against the 


1200 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


licentious and frivolous court, and the new ideals of 
Liberty, Fraternity and Equality preached by the - 
doctrinaires, sent men to the simplicity of Spartan 
life and customs as a panacea for the decadence of 
their own times. It was a bad moment for art; 
David, the accepted artistic arbiter of the day, felt 
that the ideal of painting should be that of antique 
sculpture, or rather the bad reproductions of antique 
sculpture in Roman style most accessible to the artist. 
Color, vitality, light and shadow all went by the 
board at his bidding. It was not only the lifelessness 
of his pretentious tableaux, the aridity of this monu- 
mental style of subject that made them such bad ex- 
emplars; it was the frigidity, the coldness, the mo- 
notony of its technique relying on a cold perfection 
of draughtsmanship, outline rather than plastic form. 
But in this portrait of “Mlle. Charlotte,” we see how 
much charm inadvertently slipped into the work of 
this excellent portrait painter when he was off his 
guard and not doing second-hand conceptions of 
austere Romans. 

Nearby hang two portraits by his celebrated pupil, 
Ingres, who modified the pseudo-classicism of his 
master in many ways. He spent a long time in Italy 
studying the primitives and finally fell under the 
spell of Raphael so that his work became infused 
with Italian influence. He never abandoned the 
antique ideal in his perfection of line and emphasis 
on contour, but in many of his portraits shows much 
charm of color. In the portraits of “M. Leblanc” 
and “Mme. Leblanc,” the figure is placed in full 


FRENCH PAINTING 121 


light and modeled in flat tones. Both paintings have 
something of the character of a colored drawing. 
Yet these portraits are powerful evocations both of 
personality and of bodily gesture, carried out by a 
superb synthetic line that creates a tenseness of life 
in its contours. The simplification of factual state- 
ment brings to the work an abstract, impersonal 
quality not marred by a distracting detail from the 
exquisitely fine balance of all the subtle relations of 
the design. 

In the next room, Gallery 21, we step into the 
nineteenth century and the establishment of the 
artistic leadership of France. The early nineteenth 
century was everywhere a moment of reaction 
against old standards. In France the seeds had long 
been sown in literary circles by Jean-Jacques Rous- 
seau, Chateaubriand and Mme. de Staél. Now others 
come trooping fast under the banner of Romanticism 
—Victor Hugo, Lamartine, de Musset, and a host of 
others, while across the water Walter Scott was re- 
discovering the Middle Ages and working this rich 
vein of romantic material. A little sketch (in Gal- 
lery 17) for the painting of “The Raft of the 
Medusa,” now in the Louvre, is by Géricault, one of 
the first of the Romantic painters. This sketch ap- 
pears trite and conventional in its handling, as indeed 
it is for the innovation was in the theme. In taking 
this subject from contemporary life rather than a 
classical allegory, and portraying realistic suffering 
in the wretched band of shipwrecked men, Géricault 
plunged into a new artistic epoch, without perhaps 


122 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


realizing it as he did not live long afterwards. It is 
a revolt from the impersonality, the objectivity, the 
austerity of the classical Academic mood to the sub- 
jective, the emotional, the mysterious, the colorful. 

A far greater artist, Delacroix, was to develop 
this movement, in particular bringing back the splen- 
dor of Venetian coloring to his romantic themes. A 
painting by him will be found also in Gallery 17. 
The Romantic movement found an echo in the land- 
scape painting of the Barbizon group, who painted in 
the forest of Fontainebleau or the open stretch of 
country around the little village of Barbizon. Corot 
is usually included in this group, although he came 
to it late in life. There are a number of his paint- 
ings in Gallery 21, to which we now return. 

This group of paintings by Corot shows different 
phases of his work as a landscapist, but none of his 
superb paintings of single figures. In the “Ville 
d’Avray,” “Souvenir of Normandy,” or the earlier 
“Ferryman,” he is the lyric poet, the romanticist in 
that he infuses nature with the sentiment of his own 
reactions toward her. You cannot but feel the 
poetry of these harmonious compositions, with their 
balance of light and shade, their generalization of 
natural forms so that trees are but soft blurs of rus- 
tling foliage against an exquisite paleness of vibrant 
skies, and natural forms are only vaguely perceived 
through the veils of shimmering mist that fill the 
canvas. Yet, he stems directly from Poussin, he is a 
painter of landscapes with figures where there is 
complete harmony between the figure and its set- 


FRENCH PAINTING 123 


ting, and he is classical in the balance of all this sen- 
suous beauty with a cool austerity and measure of 
reserve. Corot was the son of prosperous bourgeois 
parents, and was apprenticed for a time to a draper 
—he was a wretched clerk, drawing under the coun- 
ter in his master’s shop and wasting the hours of his 
errand-going by loitering about the quays, sketching. 
Eventually his father gave in to his son’s mad desire 
to be a painter and supplied him with a modest in- 
come, although he never believed in his talent. The 
boy went to Italy, after some study in France, and 
found himself. Here he drew—he had been badly 
taught and had much to learn and unlearn—and was 
confirmed in his love of landscape painting. During 
his three years’ stay he learned that marvelous short- 
hand of his brush that gives significance to a few 
outlines and with solidity of workmanship as foun- 
dation, seizes the fusing of tender colors in exquisite 
harmony of modulated tones. “Lake Albano,” in 
this collection, is of the early Italian period, showing 
something of his later palette in its milky tones. It 
also has seriousness of composition, and ease of han- 
dling. Corot was still using a small, fine brush at 
this period, but this he afterwards abandoned for a 
large one. When popularity came at last to Corot, 
he was past sixty, and the public clamored for repeti- 
tions of his misty dawns and vaporous twilights with 
reedy pools and silvery water, until there were, as 
someone has said, “too many dawns at the Ville 
d’Avray.” Yet it was in this period of repetition of 
subject and rather empty content that he executed a 


124 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


group of figure paintings which mark another, but 
no less important, side of his genius. 

The “Path Through the Trees” is a canvas that 
one likes to linger by. It has solidity in its masses 
of trees and depth in the recession of this green 
glade. The filtering of light through this dense 
foliage gives exquisite nuances of tone, while the 
feeling of space and movement in this forest haunt 
with its gleams of silver water enchants one. The 
figures beneath the trees are more than accents of de- 
sign—they have a sort of inevitability as part of the 
landscape. This work shows the heritage of Poussin, 
of Claude, of Virgil, the work of a painter who 
brings the wealth of his own nature to any subject. 
But it is before anything else a painting by a great 
painter who was able to impose his vision of the 
world upon natural forms and evolve through 
subtle values and a delicate personal idiom of ex- 
pression a silvery beauty of landscape—tenuous, yet 
firmly built, tremulous beauty of the stirring foliage 
and flickering light in the ebbing of mist before the 
shafts of the sun—some echo of his own delight in 
natural beauty. 

Rousseau is another of the Barbizon painters. 
His work is found in this gallery and in Gallery 17. 
He, too, was a romanticist in that he had the feeling 
of sentiment for nature, but he is not imbued with 
the classical spirit of Corot. His study of objective 
fact became almost a passion with him, and his pro- 
cedure was logical and scientific. He was much in- 
fluenced by Constable’s work, which he saw at the 


2 


FRENCH PAINTING 125 


Salon, and followed his practice of color division. 
Yet his canvases are mostly somber and tonal, rather 
than full of light. The rugged rocks and huge oaks 
of the forest appealed to his interest in veracious de- 
tail. Sometimes he succeeds in giving breadth as 
well as accuracy to his work, with a quality of ele- 
mental strength and permanence, but often he gets 
no further than a painstaking fidelity of meticulous 
record, robbed of inspiration or spontaneity. 

Millet is another member of this group. He is 
represented in this gallery by “Autumn,” the figure 
of a woman guarding a flock of turkeys on a bare 
hilltop against a broken sky of shower and storm; 
bits of sunlight break through beyond the rim 
of the hill. In this canvas you see that Millet, 
like Corot, finds supreme harmony between land- 
scape and figures, but Millet’s dramatis persone are 
peasants, not nymphs. They belong to the fields 
they labor, the harvests they reap, the primeval 
forces of nature on which they depend. Millet did 
not think of striking out a new and profitable type of 
subject but when he fled to Barbizon he found his 
métier in painting the people and scenes he knew and 
understood. He had, himself, been reared in a 
peasant household in an atmosphere of devout piety. 
Some classical education fell his way, so he had a 
lifelong delight in Virgil and Theocritus. Escaping 
from a most unsuitable teacher, Delaroche, who at- 
tempted to imbue him with a meaningless neo- 
classicism, he subsisted for a time by painting small 
nudes, which found a market, but did not bring a 


126 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES. 


real livelihood for him or his family. Millet then 
settled in Barbizon and in the refuge of this haven 
took up his life work, the epic of the peasant sprung 
from a background of toil and destined to its recur- 
rent cycle of seasonal labors. The sense of rhythmic 
movement in his heavy figures, their mass and so- 
lidity, with his finely ordered composition and the 
dignity and authority of his line makes his work — 
heroic. Yet while he was inspired with profound 
humanity in all his work, he was a painter and not 
a story-teller or social reformer, as many people 
fancy. His most popular canvas, “The Angelus,” — 
which the public invested with a vast amount of 
sentimentality, is inferior artistically to the body of 
his work. His drawings and etchings have a mon- 
umental simplicity. Unfortunately the peasant be- 
came popular, and any number of inferior artists ex- 
ploited this material. We shall see the work of 
many of these commonplace painters who treated 
peasant life with the same superficial sentimentality 
with which Greuze painted his themes of lowly life. 
A little wooden panel depicting “Don Quixote” is 
the work of a prodigious man, Honoré Daumier, 
who should in some respects be reckoned with the 
Romantics, however pronounced a realist he was. 
At twenty-five he was famous as a caricaturist, inces- 
santly holding up to ridicule the pitiful figure of the 
little Bourgeois, whom he studied with scientific re- 
lentlessness, or the rapacity, ineptness and smugness 
of an episodic Government which was a good target 
for his satire. His political caricatures landed him 


WITH A SWORD. EDOUARD MANET 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


x 
‘3 
; 
- 
’ 
; 
‘ 
Ld % 


FRENCH PAINTING 127 


finally in prison after forty years of tremendous toil 
in which his numerous magnificent lithographs were 
executed. Frenchmen have said of him that he had 
“something of Michael Angelo under his skin,” and 
Daubigny is reported to have exclaimed when he 
first saw Michael Angelo’s frescoes, “It’s Daumier.” 
In this panel Don Quixote, mounted on a white 
horse and accompanied by Sancho Panza on his mule, 
rides down the ridge of a hill toward the foreground 
where a dead horse lies. It is one of a series of Don 
Quixote pictures, for the dramatic clash of the ideal 
and the real in the story of the knight of the rueful 
countenance appealed to Daumier, as did the de- 
lightful absurdity of his fat little squire. Even in 
so slight a work as this it is possible to gain some 
idea of the artist’s power to create voluminous form 
with a play of light and dark masses and to give 
meaning to the formal structure of his slightest 
theme. Daumier was a great influence on the men of 
his time—Millet is one instance—and one of the 
really great men of the nineteenth century. In 
trenchant notation of observed fact, simplification of 
drawing, development of plastic form and grandeur 
of monumental conceptions, executed with vitality 
and marvelous economy of means, he is a surprising 
figure. 

With Courbet we come to the so-called realists 
who revolted against the elaborate stage setting of 
the romantic painters, stripping it alike of its second- 
hand Italian Renaissance allegory and of its lit- 
erary background. The choice of roadmakers break- 


128 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


ing stone on the highway or peasants huddled som- 
berly in funeral rites, as subject matter for his can- 
vases, proved to the public of his time that Courbet 
was coarse and vulgar. He was his own best press 
agent and was held back by no scruples of false mod- 
esty in proclaiming his own genius or the stupidity 
of his contemporaries who did not understand what 
art was about when not engaged in charming alle- 
gories or carefully groomed landscapes. But how- 
ever Gargantuan his vainglory and his noisy decla- 
mation appeared to the people of his day, his zsthetic 
doctrines appear quite mild now. His realism that 
he flaunted like a red flag of anarchy was merely the 
right to record the thing before him as he saw it him- 
self, without embellishments, literary or allegorical. 
He presented nature in the rough, as it were, and the 
eesthetes shuddered, as they did at his heavy, dull 
peasants. Yet he has much of the romanticist in 
him, as many of his subjects attest, and much of the 
classicist as well. The painting of “Woman with 
a Parrot” shows his robustness of handling, his abil- 
ity to create plastic design and organic figures, with 
mobility of line and an endowment of rich, sensuous 
physical beauty. Courbet’s landscapes are, perhaps, © 
his greatest work, for he organizes them as he does 
his nudes. He gives them a tremendous sense of the 
rise and fall of earth masses beneath a vastness of 
luminous sky. The landscapes shown here are in- 
dicative of his treatment, but they do not reveal the 
artist at his highest point of achievement, when he 
expends the fulness of his really great technical 


FRENCH PAINTING 129 


power with a sort of superb prodigality and actually 
identifies himself with the landscape he loves—ex- 
cept in the background of “Les Demoiselles de Vil- 
lage,” a loaned picture. His color is dull and his in- 
stinct outruns his theories, for he was not a really 
profound thinker. Yet his influence as a great 
painter grows rather than lessens. 

Manet is represented here by a fine group of can- 
vases. He is often reckoned as one of the first im- 
pressionists, because of his final interest in lumi- 
nism, but he is essentially a realist attempting to re- 
cord his own highly sensitized vision with a tech- 
nical method of his own. Courbet still used the 
masses of light and shadow and the tonality of the 
old masters whose subject matter he rejected. 
Manet went a step further and brought unity into his 
canvases without this chiaroscuro, by harmonizing 
the contrasts of color through their dissolution in 
light. “Boy with a Sword,” “Woman with a Par- 
rot” and “The Dead Christ with Angels,” belong 
to his early period when the influence of Velazquez 
was strongly felt. The restriction of the palette, 
the decorative ensemble of the composition, the 
effect of modeling obtained through this use of 
broad flat planes of color where the light is carefully — 
distributed, mark his working out of pictorial theory. 
As Meier-Graefe puts it, he began to paint “what 
he saw not what he knew the subject held.” Cour- 
bet had still retained, if unconsciously, many of the 
conventions of Romanticism, and the technical equip- 
ment of the classical painter in composition and 


130 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


structure. Manet scrapped all this and divested the 
subject of everything irrelevant to his vision of the 
whole, the instantaneous image that he seeks to pre- 
sent with no adventitious interest. In his painting of 
textures he excelled. In the “Still Life” here he 
realized exactly the surfaces and shapes and tactile 
qualities of the luscious melon, the gleaming linen, 
the water bottle with its broken lights, the petals of 
the velvety rose. “The Funeral” marks his second 
period, when he begins to leave the studio and study 
the problem of plein air painting that was to absorb 
so many painters of his group. 

Monet was one of these painters who pushed the 
study of luminism still further. He sought to re- 
cord the fleeting aspects of the outdoor world under 
the changing lights of different moments of the day. 
He was never a studio painter and his whole attempt 
was to render what he saw in nature. He saw among 
other things that there is color in shadow and that 
outdoor brilliancy of color might be attained in 
greater degree by tones in juxtaposition rather than 
by mixed pigments. He was influenced at first by 
Boudin, a French painter of sky and sea, and later in 
England by Constable, Turner and Bonington. But 
he remained entirely individual, a highly personal 
painter seizing atmosphere and vibrating effects of 
light and color. He is represented here by two 
landscapes and by “Rouen Cathedral,” one of the 
famous series showing the intricate lacework of the 
sculpture of the Cathedral facade at different mo- 
ments of illumination. 


FRENCH PAINTING 131 


He expanded Manet’s theory that the raising of 
the key of light necessitated raising the shadow, too. 
The subtlety of Monet’s perceptions led him grad- 
ually to composing in light. Through a misappre- 
hension of the title of one of his early canvases 
this group of luminists were called “Impressionists,” 
a futile and misleading term. 

Degas, who frequented the Café Guerbois, where 
this band of artists met to expound their theories, 
was an artist of high intellectual power and penetrat- 
ing observation. In his remarkable synthesis of line 
he descends directly from Ingres and classic ideals, 
but in his choice of subject matter and his use of it 
he is a realist, or a naturalist. He paints dancers of 
the Opera or Circus, race horses, Parisian women of 
every class, with an almost cruel acuteness of ob- 
servation. The Japanese prints that were becoming 
so popular in Paris in this period influenced Manet, 
as they later influenced Whistler, but they also had 
a particular effect upon the technique of Degas— 
they supplied the means of expressing the idea he 
was interested in, that is, the flux of movement, the 
tension of the human body, the resiliency of a mo- 
mentary pose, the fugitive appearance of the light 
or the spontaneity of a casual gesture. The old 
formule of geometric composition would not work 
here, but the broken-up surfaces of the Ukiyoye 
prints, which also claimed to represent the flow and 
ebb of everyday life, exactly fell in with the new 
ideas of the luminists. They permitted Degas to 
express the most exquisite balance of physical poise, 


132 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


the marvelous dynamic quality of a single move- 
ment that seems to sum up the whole; the thrust 
of the ballet girl’s foot giving us the swift intricacy 
of her pirouettes in a single instantaneous simplicity 
of impression. 

The cases that stand in the center of this gallery 
contain a collection of bronze casts made from the 
wax models of race horses, bathers, dancers—nudes 
of many kinds—that Degas modeled in his unre- 
lenting pursuit of the secrets of physical poise and 
suspended movement. You see here his minute 
analysis of muscular reflexes, of exquisite balance 
of pose, of nervous, vehement action. You realize 
how this artist, who had apparently such facility in 
seizing the protean aspects of life and motion, had 
applied himself with tremendous assiduity to a scien- 
tific study of the whole subject. The little figure of 
a ballet girl, a novice in the fatiguing work of the 
dancing school, is shown here both in frayed skirts 
and worn bodice and nude. She has been caught in 
a moment of brief repose. The sculpture is a mar- 
velous bit of realistic modeling, revealing the exact 
muscular relaxation of the tired body letting go in 
a bliss of relief, but with a curious suggestion of 
mental alertness that will set the feet obediently 
back into the measure of the dance at a moment’s 
notice. In the canvas, “An Interior,” the distinction 
of Degas’s draughtsmanship is evident. He shows 
himself also an individual and pleasing colorist, in- 
vesting all his work with a persuasive charm of har- 
monious color while he appreciates thoroughly the 


FRENCH PAINTING Lvs 


decorative possibilities of his arabesques of pattern. 

Renoir, the great figure of this group, is repre- 
sented here by a canvas of his early period, “Mme. 
Charpentier and Her Children.” In this delightful 
painting one feels how entirely French his genius 
was, how he stemmed directly from the eighteenth 
century and Rubens, yet belongs to a new age in 
which he preserves a continuity of artistic tradition. 
This painting with its gaiety and sensuous beauty, its 
flowing rhythms, solidity of form and amazing vi- 
tality of presentment comes off with such élam that 
one may forget how knowingly its texture of design 
is woven or how masterful is the fluent caressing 
brushwork. The lack of sentimental emphasis is 
Gallic, too; one sees it in Mary Cassatt’s canvases 
of mothers and children as a French influence. The 
physical dependence of these charming little crea- 
tures, aglow with animal health and spirits, is here 
realized, but there is no tremendous symbolism of 
Motherhood as English painters usually suggest. In 
the fruits and flowers of this canvas there is evi- 
dence of the artist’s pleasure in textures and sur- 
faces, yet their beauty is not an afterthought—it is 
needed to complete the luxurious, charming décor 
of the room. 

Renoir was almost self-taught as an artist, starting 
his career as a china painter. For a time he was in- 
fluenced by Courbet and Velazquez, but later com- 
ing in touch with Manet and the luminists he ac- 
cepted their general theories of light and color. But 
he departed from the Impressionists in his feeling 


134 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


for mass, his love of form, his forceful line, and his 
usual subject matter, preferring figure painting and 
only occasionally producing a landscape. His “Mou- 
lin de La Galette,” of the Louvre, shows how he 
could out-Herod Herod for he exemplifies their con- 
tentions of illumination to the wth degree in creat- 
ing the impression that the radiance of the canvas 
flows out from it as a source of light. Or, the sun- 
dappled “Déjeuner des Canotiers,” of the Phillips 
Memorial Gallery, in which the highest possibilities 
of plastic, luminous decoration are realized, with nat- 
uralism of gesture and form woven into the vibrant 
rhythms of the composition. Since this portrait of 
“Mme. Charpentier and Her Children” marks the 
threshold of the painter’s career, it is impossible to 
illustrate his progress. It is probably sufficient to re- 
call how far he went in his development of plastic 
form, in his arbitrary control of light, to model this 
solidity, and in his power of organization that makes 
him one of the great figures of French art—sum- 
ming up in his work the great traditions of the past 
and adding his own sensibility to beauty and lyrical 
charm. 

Another great artist who started out with the 
Impressionists, but left them for his own road is 
Cézanne. This artist is represented here by several 
canvases, Cézanne, though hardly a “primitive” of 
a school as he anticipated he would be, is at least an 
“old master’’; it is, therefore, impossible to estimate 
so important a figure by a few canvases, since his 
whole life was one of experiment and development. 


FRENCH PAINTING 135 


In the little landscape, “La Colline des Pauvres,” he 
shows his discovery of the power of different colors 
to make planes recede or advance, as well as his utter 
lack of interest in any literal representation of nature 
through veracity of local coloring. In the “Bathers,” 
he attempts to render the significance of movement 
by a sacrifice or distortion, as you will, of form. In 
both the landscape and the figure group, though not 
important canvases, you may gain some idea of his 
plastic unity of structure and his feeling for the uni- 
versal and essential in his subject matter. He wished 
to penetrate nature and not merely record a passing 
sensation. The “Still Life” is one of a class of the 
subjects which exerted a great influence on would-be 
followers. It makes less demand upon the under- 
standing in organization, while endowed with beauty 
of color and a sort of grandeur and intensity of ap- 
peal. In his delicate, pearly-toned water-colors it is 
easiest to realize the dynamic record of emotional 
reaction and the aim of Cézanne to impose an arbi- 
trary order on natural forms, through pure color 
and by organization of the planes of light. Al- 
though not possessing great technical equipment or 
profound intelligence, his zsthetic procedure and 
theories changed the course of modern art so that it 
is impossible to consider it without him. He is the 
predominant figure in the modern art world, which 
is only just beginning to suspect on what elemental 
truths his theories are really founded. 

An interesting and important figure represented in 
this gallery is Puvis de Chavannes, who brought a 


136 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


new contribution to mural art. He was a lover of 
nature, a mystic, something of a philosopher and a 
thoroughly cultured man. To the accepted theory 
of harmonizing the space to be decorated with the 
surrounding architecture, he added the further tenet 
that the expression should be abstract. From Giotto, 
or even Ghirlandaio, he learned the art of the neces- 
sary flatness of wall decoration. He achieves his 
flatness in part by painting in pale colors close in 
value and harmonious. The figures he models in 
gradations of the same tone so that adequate sense 
of reality is given without any sense of projection. 
His color, moreover, is kept soft and light for flat- 
ness and to brighten the effect of the interior. In © 
the compositions he advances from the somewhat 
detailed “Beheading of John the Baptist,” carried 
out with superb line and probity of design, to “The 
River” and “The Cider” for the Amiens Museum, 
and finally to the beautiful “Inter Artes et Na- 
turam” for the Museum of Rouen, where one may 
realize how carefully he has avoided complexity in 
composition, or any feeling of third dimension or 
depth. The quietness and serenity of the effect also 
depend on the space composition of a few hori- 
zontal planes in succession giving a simplicity of 
architectural design and on the willingness to allow 
spaces to tell as much as figures in the bigness of 
pattern. 

This gallery contains a number of lesser painters 
of the Barbizon group. Several canvases by Dau- 
bigny are in many cases carried out with a breadth 


FRENCH PAINTING 137 


and freedom that is nearer to modern work than 
_to his contemporaries. Diaz, an extremely uneven 
painter, and never an able draughtsman, is particu- 
larly felicitous in such a theme as “Clearing in the 
Forest of Fontainebleau,” in which his power as a 
colorist is apparent, as is his flair for breaking up the 
light by filtering it through heavy foliage and fleck- 
ing the turf with its shifting lights. ‘Friedland,’ 
by Meissonier, appears more of a curiosity to-day 
than a work of art, so strange is the effect of its 
- microscopic detail introduced in a composition on such 
a large scale. Meissonier painted a large number of 
tiny pictures of the rococo variety with infinitesimal 
fineness of detail, prosaic accuracy of shining sur- 
faces and verisimilitude of rich textures. A group 
of this type of his work will be found in adjacent 
galleries. His Napoleonic cycle, of which “Fried- 
land” is a part, indicates how difficult he found it to 
leave out a single buckle of harness, or a coat button, 
in his pursuit of photographic veracity, for he ex- 
actly reversed Manet’s system, always painting 
everything that he knew existed in a subject whether 
he could see it there or not. Regnault, one of the 
pseudo-classicists, obtained the Prix de Rome. In 
his subject matter, such as his “Horses of Achilles,” 
he demonstrates the old idea that a work was classic 
if its subject was a Roman or a Greek. Here in his 
“Salome” he shows himself a realist, delighting in an 
orgy of color and leaning on anecdote for his sup- 
port rather than on esthetic content. 


A delightful “On the Beach at Trouville” by 


138 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


- Boudin and Bastien-Lepage’s “Joan of Arc” repre- 
sent two widely severed points of view as to subject 
matter and handling. Bastien-Lepage is not happy 
in his composition. The big, pretentious canvas falls 
to pieces in its flimsy structure. The peasant, again 
borrowed from Millet, and given plenty of homely 
sentiment, accounts for the wide appeal of this can- 
vas. Two of Monticelli’s fantasies, “Court Ladies” 
and “Court of the Princess,” reveal the work of an 
unusual painter. He employed a highly individual 
type of impressionism, in which-his orchestration of 
smoldering colors sweep across the canvas in beating 
rhythms, like the gipsy music he delighted in. Un- 
like most luminists Monticelli builds his composi- 
tions with great firmness of structure and obtains 
remarkable suggestions of infinite space and mysteri- 
ous depth. His figures pass in and out of the surge 
of a jewel-like color in which the piled-up pigment 
gives an almost enameled surface. 


CHAPTER NINE 


MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS 


ASSING into Gallery 19, we find a collection of 
European paintings that need not detain us 
long. The enormous canvas of the “Horse Fair,” 
by Rosa Bonheur, presents a photographic panorama 
with prosaic fidelity of notation instead of life. 
Patriotic rather than esthetic value may be assigned 
to the work of the Diisseldorf painter, Emanuel 
Leutze, in his “Washington Crossing the Delaware” 
(which is Rhine rather than Delaware). One of 
the many sentimental exploitations of Millet’s peas- 
ant is Leibl’s “Peasant Girl.” Bécklin’s “Island of 
the Dead” shows how thoroughly bogged in litera- 
ture and sentiment German nineteenth-century art 
became. It is reported that the fine group of tragic 
cypresses of this scene was observed from the ar- 
tist’s villa near Florence. Around this focus he 
built up a purely imaginary landscape heavily laden 
with emotion and literary content. 

Fortuny’s “Spanish Lady” shows this dashing 
painter at a moment of high achievement, with 
soundness and sobriety as well as virtuosity to his ac- 
count. The large group of paintings by Anton 
Mauve introduces a Dutch painter who works much 
in the manner of the Barbizon school, imbuing the 


barren, flat country of his canvases with a poetic 
139 


140 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


sentiment. “Changing Pasture” is the strongest of 
the group, giving a sense of weight and mass to the 
lumbering animals and the peasant woman who 
drives them. The gray sky and gray monotony of 
world beneath it are charged with moisture that per- 
meates the whole scene. The figures stand out in 
all this bareness and flatness with tremendous 
emphasis, 

In Gallery 18, we find more sentimentalized peas- 
ants such as Lhermitte’s “Among the Lowly” or 
Breton’s “Peasant Girl Knitting.” The Orientalists 
appear here in rank and file. They are the Ro- 
manticists who fled from the tyranny of the classic, 
not to the medieval but to the Orient, with Dela- 
croix in the lead. Bargue, whose laborious craft ad- 
mitted only a small output during his lifetime, is 
represented by two canvases. They show the same 
passion for surface finish and meticulous elaboration 
as does the work of Meissonier. 

Géréme is not so easy to classify, for at times he 
is a realist, at others a classicist, showing a broad 
handling and a reverence for the tradition of linear 
design; but again he is pure Romanticist, as in these 
canvases where he is as one obsessed in his paintings 
of coffee houses and mosques, with the piling up of 
luxurious detail of color and incident, leaving no 
clarity of impression. Fortuny is seen in his char- 
acteristic work here, as an Orientalist. His canvases 
are all glitter and sparkle. He seizes upon the in- 
tricacy of Eastern décor for the sheer delight that its 
gorgeousness of color and textures offers to his bril- 


MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS | 141 


liant execution. It is, in fact, as little of the East as 
possible, merely a surface skim, but a dazzling exer- 
cise in facile painting. 

There are anecdotal canvases aplenty, such as 
“The Storm,” invested with literary appeal in the 
popular mind by association with the figures of Paul 
and Virginie of Bernadin St. Pierre’s idyllic tale. 
Or Chaplin’s “Haidée,” the heroine of one of 
Byron’s poems, showing how all good Romanticists 
pulled together; Max’s “Last Token,” reeking with 
sentiment, Boldini’s “Dispatch Bearer,” with its stage 
set of military backdrop, the sugared insipidity of 
Bouguereau’s peasant subjects, are others that might 
be mentioned or kindly omitted. The actual bru- 
tality of real conflict appears in Detaille’s big can- 
vases depicting incidents of the Franco-Prussian War. 
They seem literal, journalistic reporting rather than 
art. One of Franz von Lenbach’s Munich portraits, 
sinking into a bituminous penumbra, is also here. 
ite decorative “Lachrymae” by Sir Frederick 
Leighton, insipid and frigid, represents the best 
British infusion of art and literature that turns out 
to be neither. 

In Gallery 17, Decamps, another Orientalist, gives 
a glowing version of the East in his “Night Patrol, 
Smyrna.” This work possesses the life and warmth 
which all Fortuny’s complexity of glittering facts 
never produces. Bonnat’s typical work, portraiture 
—hard, inflexible and cold in color—is represented 
in another gallery in the portrait of “John Taylor 
Johnston,” while here you may see his earlier, 


142 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


warmer, more flowing style in two Oriental subjects. 
Théodore Rousseau’s “Edge of the Woods” escapes 
to a large degree the insistence of its minute detail. 
It has rich color and firm structure and succeeds in 
enveloping the scene in atmosphere despite its elab- 
orate finish of surface. Fantin-Latour’s “Portrait of 
a Lady” is a work of serene and flower-like beauty. 
Its distinction of handling reveals the real classicist 
conveying a personal note while conforming to tradi- 
tional standards. The rightness of the arrangement 
of detail, the cool, low gamut of tones, and the charm 
and vitality of the characterization mark the artist’s 
power as a portrait painter. 

“Ville d’Avray,” by Corot, is one of the spon- 
taneous versions of this theme, not one of the merely 
clever repetitions of a popular subject. “The Sleep 
of Diana” shows him half-way between his early 
manner and his later one. It has classic solidity and 
bigness of conception, tempered with a delicate per- 
ception of a mood of nature in subtle nuances of tone. 
Here are the browns that will later be greens. The 
simplicity, serenity and fluency of the painting with 
its transparent shadows and envelopment of mys-— 
terious light show him a Romanticist in his approach 
to nature. 

The great Romanticist, Delacroix, is represented 
here by “The Abduction of Rebecca” from Scott’s 
Ivanhoe. It is realism, but not from contemporary 
life. Its actuality is of the Middle Ages. The fig- 
ures have solidity; the whole canvas is imbued with 
the opulence of Venetian coloring. The artist’s fancy 


Miwa vA Us BOURNE. ) JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS 143 


is not fettered by his facts, but becomes spontaneous 
and impassioned, endowing the subject with vitality, 
splendor and rushing movement. Delacroix was not 
only a great experimenter in color, but one of the 
real founders of modern painting in his use of the 
broken patches of color that he found in Constable’s 
work. With them he imparted to his paintings a 
brilliant vibrancy. He is literary and romantic, but 
he also possesses taste and discretion so that his work 
has balance in addition to a magic of coloring and 
freedom from emotional restraint. 

In this gallery we find two of the Barbizon group, 
Jacque and Troyon. They follow directly from the 
Dutch painters, in their animal subjects. Jacque in 
his “Sheepfold” floods the interior with a golden 
glow from the open door, picking out an elaboration 
of detail—the minutely realized mass of huddling 
sheep, the chickens, the farm boy and his bundle of 
hay. This is warmer and more fluent than much of 
his work. Although this painter loved and knew 
animals, his obsession to render textures and sur- 
faces with hard precision robs his work of veracity 
or spontaneity. His painting has much the character 
of an engraving. In his etching, in fact, you often 
feel that he should have held the burin and not the 
needle for his inflexible rigidity in recording objec- 
tive fact. Troyon, in “Holland Cattle,” has realized 
the pictorial value of the flat Dutch landscape as set- 
ting for his animal paintings. There is breadth and 
depth in the spatial composition of this landscape, a 
oneness of the animals and the fertile meadows, that 


144 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


gives them alike an elemental simplicity and power. 

In a decidedly different vein is the work of Alfred 
Stevens, a Belgian painter, whose “Japanese Robe” 
is in this gallery. This artist devoted his talents to 
portraying the elegance of Parisian femininity in the 
opulence of the Second Empire’s fitful burst of 
splendor. He is sincere in his feeling and renders 
his interpretations of boudoir and drawing-room with 
serious artistic purpose. The Oriental fashion of the 
time is reflected in this subject: it was one of the 
many manifestations of exotic invasion in Parisian 
life. As Guy seized the glitter and sparkle of the 
feverish activity of enjoyment of the period, Stevens 
gives the exquisite record of its luxurious interiors, 
their fashionable ladies surrounded by every blan- 
dishment and extravagance of modish vanity. It is 
a charming, yet thoroughly veracious, cross-section 
of life cut at an unusual angle. 

Cabanel’s portrait of “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe” 
shows him a portrait painter immersed in the lus- 
cious textures of stuffs and delighting in the confec- 
tions of the modiste. Couture, his artistic ancestor, 
has here a genre painting, “Day Dreams,” that 
hardly illustrates his usual curious reassembling of 
classic precepts and motifs in a new formula suited to 
the taste of his day, and guaranteed to produce bril- 
liant if empty paintings, richer in colorful detail than 
in inspiration. Jongkind, whose “Dutch Fishing 
Boats” and “Honfleur” are here, exhibited at the 
famous Salon des Refusés with Manet and Pisarro. 
His influence in procedure of broken color was fol- 


MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS 145 


lowed by the early luminists, although his color key 
was low and soon superseded in the later men by 
brilliancy and gaiety. 

In Gallery 16 we come upon the early Americans, 
reflecting European schools, particularly the British, 
in their portrait painting. In the portraits of “Sam- 
uel Mifflin” and his wife, “Rebecca Edgehill Mif- 
flin,” Charles Willson Peale shows charm of color 
and force of characterization. The difficulty of fore- 
shortening is evident in the portrait of Samuel, giv- 
ing a one-sidedness to his heavy figure because of the 
drawing of one leg. But the strength of the en- 
semble triumphs over this detail. In the distant 
view of sea and sail there is, perhaps, a suggestion 
of the occupation that has succeeded so well as to 
support this portly severity and solidity of bearing. 
The portrait of his wife and her granddaughter is 
delightful with its shimmery gray silk overdress and 
quilted blue underskirt, the profusion of white lace 
falling over neck and shoulders. Near-by is an es- 
pecially interesting portrait, that of “Mistress Ann 
Galloway,” by Gustavus Hesselius, 2 Swede who 
settled in America in the early years of the eighteenth 
century and is the earliest known painter in this coun- 
try. This rather severe lady in her satin amplitude 
of dress, her Quaker fichu and cap, is given a little 
spriteliness by the pleasing warmth of the landscape 
of the background and the deep blue of her chair 
back (she does not make the concession of leaning 
against it). It is an interesting document of Ameri- 
can art, and a thoroughly interesting painting. 


146 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


The portrait of “Maria Taylor Byrd,” by Charles 
Bridges, shows the influence of Kneller. It is exe- 
cuted with ease and decorative instinct that give im- 
portance to the background landscape. The model- 
ing of form with light and shadow and the nice 
handling of textures, as well as breadth in treatment, 
make this a good picture as it was probably a good 
portrait. The portrait of “Mrs. Sylvanus Bourne,” 
by John Singleton Copley, shows this famous painter 
in a particularly fine example. His precision of out- 
line, vivacity of coloring and directness of present- 
ment make it a fascinating work. One sees this alert, 
domineering old lady as the direct ancestress of Mrs. 
Manson Mingott of The Age of Innocence. Itisa 
harmonious realization of personality and objective 
fact that makes a handsome painting. The render- 
ing of the textures of the flesh, the suggestion of 
reluctant idleness in the folding of the vigorous 
hands, the sprightliness and vitality of the whole fig- 
ure, are amazing. If in his later work Copley fre- 
quently yielded to his advisers in subduing his color 
and beauty of textures to a more arid uniformity of 
tone, in this instance there is nothing to be desired in 
the splendid performance. Another good example 
of his work is the portrait of “Judge Joseph Sher- 
burne.” 

Across the way hangs the well-known Gibbs-Chan- 
ning-Avery portrait of “George Washington,” by 
Gilbert Stuart. This echoes Raeburn, as Copley 
seems to indicate something of Hogarth’s influence. 
The group of Sully’s work indicates something of 


MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS _ 147 


his large output and contemporary popularity. His 
-suavity, blandness and good color tell heavily in his 
list of Philadelphia’s society roster. If he idealized 
everybody as he did Queen Victoria (whom he de- 
picts in his study for the portrait of the Wallace 
Collection, as turning a swan-like neck to the ob- 
server and revealing a dazzling charm of physical 
beauty), it is not to be wondered at that he was 
popular. The studies of her coronation jewelry 
add further historical interest to this picture. In 
“Mother and Son” the treatment is broader with 
pleasing arabesques of design. 

Two Spanish portraits by Stuart reveal his earlier 
style, before his long sojourn in England. Yet here, 
in spite of the evident preoccupation in the elaborate 
dress of the sitters, is great power of characteriza- 
tion. The echo of Sir Joshua’s grand style is to be 
found in Allston’s “The Deluge,” the same type of 
subject that John Martin delighted in. “Hagar and 
Ishmael” and “Return of the Prodigal Son” show 
his serious attachment to the historical subjects that 
Sir Joshua advocated, if not practiced. David wrung 
dry of inspiration or significance seems to be the ideal 
of this mediocre academic painting. 

This gallery also contains works by the painters 
of the so-called Hudson River school. Landscape 
was a new departure in American art of the first 
half of the nineteenth century. It began in a grand, 
panoramic manner that reflected the romantic mood 
of the literary moment. Few of its painters were 
trained in any school and had more regard for metic- 


148 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


ulous detail than for composition. Asher B. Durand, 
whose work is in this gallery and the previous one, is 
in a way the founder of this movement. He had a 
sincere delight in nature and an affection for the 
landscape he painted. He did not introduce the 
moralizing sentimentality of the later men, and even 
in his larger and less interesting canvases shows a 
fidelity to observed nature. 

Durand gathered around him a group of young 
artists who went on long trips of exploration and 
painting in the Catskills. Thomas Cole was one of 
these followers, and the real discoverer of the beau- 
ties of the Hudson River. These painters could not 
resist making a tremendous panorama of nature, put- 
ting in figures, rivers, mountains, meadows, trees— 
everything in the category of natural phenomena— 
as much to demonstrate the bigness and splendor of 
their country as to make pictures. In their rare 
small paintings they show the freshness of their in- 
spiration and real artistic endowments. “The Aigean 
Sea” by Frederic E. Church, with its spectacular 
rainbow, ruins, cliffs, islands, sea and foreground 
figures, indicates how contact with European art en- 
larged still further the scale of painting, making the 
grand imperative. Other painters of this school, 
whose work is in this gallery, are Thomas Doughty, 
Jasper Cropsey, John Kensett, and John Casilear 
(whose perfunctory work falls far below the others). 
It is also interesting to note that the work of Homer 
Martin, George Inness and Alexander Wyant, in 
this gallery, reveals that these artists started their 


MISCELLANEOUS PAINTINGS _— 149 


careers profoundly influenced by the Hudson River 
painters, in subject matter and treatment. 

Frank Duveneck is one of the painters who turned 
first to Munich for his artistic training, although 
later he took his little group of students, the “Duve- 
neck Boys,” to Venice, Florence and other Italian 
spots for study and painting trips. His first work 
shows the Munich bituminous backgrounds, the thick, 
rich pigment and the tremendous contrasts of unc- 
tuous blacks and dazzling whites. But he also 
evolved a style of his own in the use of this tech- 
nique, so that he is not only prodigiously clever in his 
vehemence of brushwork, but displays a sensitive- 
ness of modeling and a penetration of character in 
his portraiture. In this work, evidently of his 
Munich period, the half-length seated figure of the 
old peasant is rendered in almost a monochrome. 
The emphasis is on realistic detail, yet there is a sin- 
cerity and a directness that give strength to the work. 

A number of the canvases here are by mural 
painters—John La Farge, William Morris Hunt 
and Elihu Vedder—and cannot in this range ade- 
quately represent the characteristic work of these 
men, although La Farge’s “Muse of Painting” is in 
itself an unusual and effective work carried out in 
flat low tones which achieve a fine serenity of dec- 
orative effect. 

If anyone has any doubt of the character of the 
Victorian era in these our United States, let him look 
at Eastman Johnson’s “Family Group,” and he 
will be fully documented. Heavy red curtains, 


150 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


the art nouveau of furnishings in the Eastlake fur- 
niture, a rug with insistent floridity, make a stage 
set for a group of father, mother, eleven children, 
grandmother and grandfather, all engaged in do- 
mestic occupations in the library. The baby’s long 
dress, in itself, is a revelation of other days and fash- 
ions. The more one studies this unusual painting, 
the more it discloses of the flavor of a bygone day. 
It is a valuable historical record. 

Two paintings by George Fuller, “Nydia” and 
“She Was a Witch,” may better be considered when 
the other galleries are reached where more of his 
work may be seen. The portrait of “De Witt Clin- 
ton” by Samuel F. B. Morse should be noted, how- 
ever, since Morse is better known as the inventor of 
telegraphy than as an artist; yet this vigorous por- 
trait shows how much of a painter he was. More- 
over, Clinton is a figure of great interest—associated 
with our local history as Mayor of New York City, 
Governor of New York State and promoter of the 
Erie Canal. 


CHAPTER ‘TEN 


AMERICAN PAINTING 


N the last gallery we have seen how the begin- 
nings of American art echoed that of the old 
world, particularly British portraiture; yet an indi- 
vidual note is felt in the early work of Inness, 
Wyant, and Homer Martin. In Gallery 15 the 
native talent of America asserts itself in the work of 
Winslow Homer, who is well represented by five 
paintings. It would be difficult to think of this work 
having been done by anyone but an American. It 
strikes its roots down into our soil and is nourished 
on our tradition of life and experience. 

Homer’s teaching and training was in lithography. 
His technical accomplishment in painting sometimes 
falls short of his tremendous esthetic impulse, but 
his genius triumphs over this lack of virtuosity. His 
originality and power at times give an almost brutal 
character to his handling, yet there is a fine percep- 
tion of values and subtle relations of tone in his 
most forthright paintings. He succeeds in finding 
the essential character of the natural form he is ren- 
dering and depicts it in his own personal idiom with 
a magical quality of life. It would be difficult to 
find traces of foreign influences in his work. In 
fact he was out of his native country only for a 


short stay on the English coast where he painted its 
I5I 


152 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


fisherfolk as later he became interested in the fisher- 
men and seamen of the Maine coast. This visit to 
England may have given him, as is sometimes as- 
serted, a different vision of the world, or may have 
developed more rapidly his penetration and appre- 
ciation of air and light as factors in landscape. 

In these four marine paintings the dynamic force 
of the moving water is felt irresistibly, yet there is 
always the power of design to give the work its pe- 
culiar distinction. The fidelity of the record of ob- 
jective fact is amazing in the weight and bulk of the 
heaving water and the voluminous mass of the rocks 
against which it beats. Yet without any romantic 
sentimentalizing, there is also a suggestion of the 
tremendous drama of elemental forces which invests 
such work as this with a profound significance be- 
yond its momentary aspect. It is this feeling of the 
dominating power of natural forces that one feels in 
“The Gulf Stream,” in the next gallery, and this 
is saved from anecdotal illustration, not only through 
its zsthetic content, powerful design and melodic 
rhythms of line, but also through the dramatic con- 
trast of man’s power pitted against this impersonal, 
relentless force of nature. The color in this canvas 
is in a higher key than usual, perhaps because of its 
tropical subject matter. Homer was not a great 
colorist, except in his water-colors. There is always 
something of the quality of his lithographic design 
of balanced blacks and whites in his oils. Also in 
the next gallery is the unfinished painting, “Shoot- 
ing the Rapids,” dynamic in its movement. This 


jp fo wnasnpy unjyodo.sjajy 


YHANOH MOISNIM ‘“YALSVAH LYON 


AMERICAN PAINTING 153 


was the artist’s last work, on which he was engaged 
at the time of his death. His early period of Civil 
War pictures and Southern scenes is likewise repre- 
sented in Gallery 12. These paintings serve as a 
reminder of his services as illustrator on the staff of 
Harpers Weekly, where his drawings had indiffer- 
ent reproduction through engraving. His water- 
colors are a chapter by themselves and will be con- 
sidered in the collection of water-colors in the Brook- 
lyn Museum. 

The arrangement and material of the American 
galleries are miscellaneous. For this reason it is 
impossible to trace any continuity of artistic expres- 
sion or indicate even briefly how one movement was 
succeeded by another. Consequently, it must be an 
equally hit-and-miss method of observation that 
brings us next to one of the best known of American 
artists, John Singer Sargent, whose “Mme. Gau- 
treau” (or “Mme. X”’) is in this gallery. Sargent’s 
work in murals cannot be studied here; his water- 
colors will be considered in the Brooklyn collection. 
His portraits in this museum represent the type of 
work by which he is best known. Not only best, but 
rightfully best, known for his especial endowment 
was as a portrait painter, although his desire led him 
to mural decoration. For this latter work power of 
constructive design is imperative, a gift he did not 
possess. One feels his weakness of design even in 
portrait groups. In one-figure presentment, brought 
to such perfection by the genius of Velazquez—in 
his solution of the formidable task of royal portrai- 


154 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


ture in ceremonial formality—Sargent attained a 
marvelous proficiency. In pure painting it would be — 
difficult to find more beauty or greater brilliancy 
than his magical record, detached and intellectual, 
of objective fact. The controversy that even now 
rages over his artistic achievement arises in great 
part from the desire to impute to him gifts that he 
did not possess, rather than to acknowledge the great 
ones he undoubtedly may lay claim to. His admir- 
ers insist that in order to appreciate the tremendous 
technical endowment of this unusual artist one must 
admit that his work reveals psychological insight, 
depth and profound reflection. There is something 
very absolute and convincing in the splendid char- 
acterizations of his best work, but to many of us 
they appear not as works of imaginative creation or 
profundity, but marvelous presentments, decorative 
in effect and beguiling in their splendor and mun- 
dane éclat. Nor is it necessary for a star to twinkle 
in the great constellation of such painters as Rem- 
brandt, Velazquez, or Hals, to shed a very dazzling 
light. | 

In the portrait of “Mme. Gautreau” (sometimes 
known as “Mme. X”), the work of the artist’s early 
period is represented, while he was still in Paris and 
beginning to outshine his master, Carolus Duran. 
Unfortunately the deterioration of pigment has been 
proceeding so rapidly in this canvas that the first 
contour of the drawing for the profile is visible. 
But the power of the work is obvious. There is none 
of the later bravura and flash of virtuosity in this 


AMERICAN PAINTING 155 


serious portraiture. In it you may feel that the artist 
and his subject were decidedly antagonistic, for it 
is a curious idea of portraying a supposedly beauti- 
ful woman. Yet that latent hostility may also be 
entirely fanciful, since the artist has conveyed the 
patrician elegance, the authority, the aristocratic en- 
tourage of this proud lady in striking clarity, as well 
as her grace of swift surprising movements and atti- 
tudes. The picture aroused violent controversy 
among the friends and admirers of the sitter, who 
considered that Sargent had done her beauty a great 
injustice and made her ridiculous with extravagance 
of pose. In fact, it was supposed at one time that 
the unpopularity arising from this performance 
caused Sargent to leave Paris. The cameo-like pre- 
cision of her profile and the arresting suggestion of 
personality are still so vivid that the painting remains 
one of the artist’s most popular works—one which 
he, himself, professed to have considered among his 
best. 

In Gallery 12 is Sargent’s portrait of the artist, 
William M. Chase, that is by way of being quite 
another fashion of performance. Here is a brilliant 
technical feat, the very pyrotechnics of portraiture. 
The artist in his black clothes is set against a dark 
background. He holds brushes, mahlstick and 
palette, and seems to have whirled swiftly about to 
face you in a graceful flourish of gesture. A friend 
of Sargent’s has stated that this dashing portrait was 
finished in less than an hour, a fact which reveals 
the artist’s ability to seize an instantaneous, vital im- 


156 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


pression of his sitter, and his phenomenal surety and 
facility in carrying out this acute observation. 

The big canvas of “The Wyndham Sisters,” by 
Sargent, which hangs here, has been recently ac- 
quired. It is a valuable record of an epoch now 
vanished forever. The leisure, the formal ele- 
gance, the carefully preserved convenances of the 
pre-war world bred such exquisite and ornamental 
ladies, who are far removed—surely more than the 
quarter-century of time’s lapsing—from the ener- 
getic, robust types of society leaders of to-day. In 
the effort to gain spontaneity and ease of presentation 
the composition had to go by the board so that the 
group breaks apart, with the enormous space of wall 
rather empty and dull, for all the pretty symbolism 
of a family portrait by Watts breaking its monotony. 
The virtuosity of the work is amazing. The cascade 
of gleaming white breaking into a spectrum’s colors 
in its folds and ripplings, the delicate, aristocratic 
heads held so proudly on their long necks, stand out 
vitally against the stuffs and decorations of the room 
and all the luxury of furnishings. It is superbly 
presented for all its lack of solidity. While it is 
papery and thin, yet it is astonishingly vivid as a 
portrayal of types and an epoch. 

Also in Gallery 12 is “The Hermit,” an impres- 
sionistic landscape in which, under flecking sunlight 
falling through foliage, is seated the nude figure of 
an emaciated old man. The whole canvas is alive 
with vehement stabs of direction, slashes of the 
brush that concentrate on the foreground figure of 


AMERICAN PAINTING 157 


this old man with a sort of passion of intensity. It 
is an unusual type of work for the artist, possessing 
the spontaneity and directness of a water-color that 
wrings out the very marrow of the scene with dras- 
tic economy of statement. Returning to Gallery 15, 
there is a “Tyrolese Interior,” showing how the 
travel notes of this gifted painter become solid and 
substantial with much of the authority of his more 
formal canvases. 

Because of lack of sequence in the arrangement of 
the American paintings in these galleries, they must 
be taken in a sort of sauve gui peut method—as one 
reaches them. In the landscapes one finds the real 
_American note, a blend of downright realism and 
romance that make a decided individual flavor. The 
interpretation of nature in personal idiom is evident, 
an obviously subjective expression of mood with an 
equally evident objective veracity. Rockwell Kent’s 
“Winter,” an early work but one which in many ways 
he has never surpassed, is stark realism in its bleak 
forthrightness of statement, yet there is a sense of 
mystery in its cold green sea and sinister sky. Its 
flat arabesque of pattern is highly decorative. This 
artist, never a great colorist, is highly felicitous in 
his pen and ink work and wood-block engravings— 
most of them illustrations for his own books—which 
reveal his originality of design and the sinuous 
rhythm of his line. The sparkling “Isle of Shoals” 
by Childe Hassam is impressionistic in handling; 
personal in the glowing color of its palette and 
the beautiful pattern of light. This landscape is 


158 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


only one of the many forms of creative expression 
of this artist. Water-colors, etchings and figure 
paintings also attest his fecundity of invention and 
sensitive Vision. 

Cecilia Beaux’s “Girl in White” is an arresting 
portrait—its white textures of filmy dress on the 
white sofa covering breaking into prismatic color and 
the reflections of all these rainbow whites in the 
mirror with splashes of color in the décor of the 
room and the warm tints of flesh making a pleasing 
harmony. Gifford Beal’s colorful “Mayfair” and 
“Albany Boat” show use of contemporary material 
in a highly decorative effect with crisp touches 
that give life to the scenes. Theodore Robinson’s 
“Giverny” is the work of one of the first Americans 
to follow the lead of the French impressionists. It 
is also the work of a man who for all his subtleties 
of light and color dissolving in light had a precise 
statement of fact that gives strength to his compo- 
sitions. Ernest Lawson’s “Winter” is a canvas in 
which one realizes how little facts contribute to the 
real work of art, for the uncompromising bleakness 
of the scene is commonplace enough. Yet to the 
sensitive vision of the artist relations of line, of mass 
and color give this landscape the quality of a mood 
of nature, seized with sound craftsmanship and a 
poetic play of opalescent color over the ice-choked 
stream and snowy hillside. 

Jonas Lie is represented here by “The Conquer- 
ors,” a view of the engineering work on the Panama 
Canal. The artist is a Norwegian by birth, but in 


MADAME X. JOHN S. SARGENT 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


AMERICAN PAINTING 159 


his work and life has long been associated with 
America. He chooses contemporary life as his ma- 
terial, with the two themes of mountain and sea as 
his principal subjects. Here he is explicit in his 
depiction of naturalistic detail, using sweeping 
rhythms and swift thrusts of direction to express 
this mighty struggle of man and nature. His color 
too is interpretative of the visual impression of this 
gigantic scene. 

Charles W. Hawthorne is the winner of many 
honors—prizes, awards, etc., from a long roster of 
exhibitions. He is at his best in the type of subject 
used in “The Trousseau,” in which the delicate 
charm of adolescence is exquisitely portrayed. The 
beauty of the color, the simplicity and dignity of the 
conception, make this canvas memorable. It rises 
above the anecdotal to the dramatic in its synthesis 
of mood, with none of the theatrical décor of much 
of the later work, where an artificial handling of 
high lights and old-master backgrounds makes the 
effect less sincere. 

Of an earlier day is “The Green Bodice” by J. 
Alden Weir, a painter of extremely uneven output, 
yet always aristocratic and distinctive. Here the 
individual character of his color scheme is especially 
harmonious in its decorative effect. It also illustrates 
his exquisite types of womanhood. In landscapes, 
still lifes or figure paintings, this artist expressed 
himself with no triteness of formula or leaning on 
conventions of painting. His sensitiveness, his cul- 
tural background, his personal idiom of expression 


160 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


make his work, however slight of interest, while in 
his best performance there is significance and a re- 
markable quality of poetic interpretation. A friend 
and fellow artist of Weir, John H. Twachtman, is 
represented by a single canvas, “The Water Fall.” 
This conveys but little idea of his genius for render- 
ing luminous effects of atmosphere or the evanes- 
cence of a tremulous mood of nature with exquisitely 
delicate refraction of color planes. Here, in a sub- 
ject which Twachtman often painted, the effect is 
tonal, emphasizing the balance of color masses and 
design. There is little naturalism, yet the painting 
conveys an impression of an intimate approach to 
nature with appreciation of general, rather than par- 
ticular, relations. He seems immeasurably nearer to 
the work of the modern artist than were his con- 
temporaries, probably because of his interest in de- 
sign which he imposed on natural forms, yet with no 
insensitive arbitrariness, for he seemed able to pene- 
trate to the fundamental character of his subject 
matter and preserve its essentials, however abstract 
his design. Here were two impressionists, Weir and 
Twachtman, greatly influenced by French masters, 
modifying their procedure to suit their own tempera- 
ments until they found the means to express their 
own personal reactions to natural beauty. 

The cultural background of Arthur B. Davies is 
evident. Davies, in his various phases of romanticist, 
classicist and cubist, seeks symbolic expression for 
his imagination. It may be medizval legend, classic 
myth or purely personal evocation of romance that 


AMERICAN PAINTING 161 


he clothes with a wistful quality of beauty with the 
impression that form, rhythm and color have been 
especially called forth by the particular demand of 
subject matter. Always decorative, with a special 
flair for rhythmic balance and charm of surface, the 
later work of this artist has shown more preoccupa- 
tion with form and solidity. His power as a 
draughtsman is especially apparent in his sanguines 
and charcoal drawings that have a fine precision of 
contour and endowment of life. He is represented 
here by four canvases. 

The importance of Robert Henri to the develop- 
ment of American art, or his real achievement as a 
painter, can hardly be judged by the canvas shown 
here. It belongs to his later, facile work, when 
sheer dexterity of technique and power of swift char- 
acterization unite in a formula of figure painting that 
lacks the power and originality of his earlier work. 
So much water has flowed under the bridges since 
Henri’s appearance on the art horizon that it is im- 
possible, perhaps, for the contemporary modern to 
realize what a tremendous force for freedom and 
individual expression Henri has been, both in his own 
work and in his teaching. He adapted Manet’s prin- 
ciple of design by mass rather than line, and his creed 
of the freedom of the painter to choose his own sub- 
ject matter. Instead of the careful academic draw- 
ing of the composition, later given its proper local 
tints, he draws with the brush directly and boldly, 
reaching great beauty of surfaces and harmony of 
tones, especially in his early figure paintings, where 


162 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


black and white with flesh tones are the foundations 
of the beautiful color schemes so brilliantly carried 
out. As a teacher, it would be difficult to estimate 
the influence he has exerted on a large group of 
present-day painters who are in the forefront of the 
art world. | 

In the next gallery, 13, we find a figure painting, 
“Portrait of a Young Woman,” by Abbott Thayer, 
which is as distinctly American as the landscape work 
we have been looking at, yet is highly individual. 
There is something more of the goddess than the 
mortal about this superb creature, who springs from 
classic models as her origin yet is entirely natural 
and unpedantic in her presentation. The heavy im- 
pasto of the work, the careful distribution of mass 
and the serenity and dignity of the conception are 
characteristic of Thayer’s figure painting. He shows 
himself a modern, for all his classical research, in his 
entire elimination of the non-essential in his synthe- 
sis of impression. “The Ring” by John W. Alexan- 
der is the work of a painter who is perhaps better 
known as a mural decorator than as a portrait painter. 
He is also represented in Gallery 16 by “Walt Whit- 
man,” in Gallery 15 by “Study in Black and Green.” 
His is all impressionistic work, in which form is dis- 
solved in light and a dramatic intensity given by a 
flood of beating radiance. The “Good Gray Poet” 
appears rather unsubstantial in his actual form, since 
all the light is concentrated on his head and hands 
making them seem unrelated to anything else. Here 
in “The Ring” the distribution of light is more even 
and the design highly decorative. 


AMERICAN PAINTING 163 


George Inness’s “Peace and Plenty” of this gal- 
lery is an early work somewhat in the panoramic 
manner of the Hudson River school, with an Ital- 
lanate touch of grandeur. We have also his “Spring 
Blossoms,” of a much later period when he had, 
as it were, gone through impressionism and come out 
into the full maturity of his own personal expression. 
“Karly Morning, Venice,”? by Gedney Bunce is the 
work of a man who practically devoted himself to 
Venetian scenes. His gifts as a colorist and his 
graceful draughtsmanship give substance to the 
charm of his work. 

In this gallery are works by the so-called tonalists 
and romanticists, sometimes one and the same person. 
Ralph Blakelock is usually reckoned as a “romanti- 
cist” by persons who must have labels. His tragic 
life seems echoed in the mystery and eerie sugges- 
tion of his canvases, where light and shadow are 
orchestrated into weird melody. Impressionism was 
a natural expression for this artist’s mystic attitude 
toward life, but his low gamut of tone and highly 
enameled surfaces, with their filigree of foliage 
against a strange brilliancy of light, are totally unlike 
other forms of luminosity. ‘Pipe Dance,” one of 
his Indian subjects, is not equal to his best achieve- 
ment, perhaps, yet it has a decided character of indi- 
vidual expression in its highly curious symbolism of 
natural forms and emotional power. 

Horatio Walker is another American painter who 
expresses personal reaction to natural beauty, usually 
dealing with peasant subjects. In “The Sheepfold” 
his naturalism and careful detail are offset by the 


1644 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


poetic character of his treatment. In the later “Har- 
rower” this realism gives way to broader effects with 
a consequent gain in the envelopment of atmosphere 
with more concentration on the main elements of 
design. 

George Fuller’s “Quadroon” is the work of a 
painter who seems in a class by himself, scarcely in- 
fluenced by other painters and leaving no direct ar- 
tistic progeny. He was ahead of his time in his atti- 
tude towards painting, for he was absorbed in the 
problems of light and atmosphere. When he was 
scientifically probing the variations of color in light 
and shadow, his fellow artists were still concerned 
with precision of contour and sharp definition of 
form. In France at this same time Monet was 
studying his problems of light and atmospheric ef- 
fects in connection with the chromatic variations per- 
ceptible to his highly sensitized vision. The two 
men arrived at different conclusions—Monet adopt- 
ing a high-keyed palette, whose brilliant colors were 
placed side by side with no alleviation of shadow, 
while Fuller struck a note much further down the 
- scale, deeper color and an ambience of dusky, golden 
light. 

The three paintings already seen, “Nydia,” “And 
She Was a Witch” and “The Quadroon,” illustrate 
his characteristic ideal figure painting. In Gallery 
12 the portrait of his son, “Head of a Boy,” indi- 
cates another, and less important phase of his work. 
The three first canvases are purely ideal, the imag- 
inings, doubtless, of those years when, called from a 


AMERICAN PAINTING 165 


circle of friends and a promising career in art, he was 
obliged to return to Deerfield, Massachusetts, to 
take up the management and responsibility of the 
family farm. These fifteen years, during which he 
was hardly able to paint at all because of the pressure 
of work and cares, were not, apparently, lost years, 
but fallow ones in which his mind stored up mate- 
rial for later expansion and his artistic gift slowly 
matured. These paintings show him a mystic and a 
romanticist, finding in his own intensely individual 
technique the means to give body and substance to 
his dreams. Yet he was an untiring experimenter 
with technical processes, now using a heavy under- 
painting, now glazes, piling up pigment and break- 
ing the thick impasto to gain vibration. Painting out 
detail that seemed irrelevant or too insistent for the 
unified impression of his pattern of light, or modify- 
ing the first drawing, he sought in every way to gain 
control .of his medium. Because of his occasional 
unfortunate use of bitumen to give greater richness 
of tone, much of the color of his canvases is dull, and 
none has any real freshness of tone. Yet in their 
faded dimness you may realize the haunting beauty 
of a mysterious world evoked by the artist and filled 
with elusive creatures of his fancy steeped in a ra- 
diance of amber light that invests them with a 
strange eerie quality. 

Also in Gallery 13 are “Dirge of the Three 
Queens” and “King Lear” by Edwin A. Abbey, both 
illustrator and mural decorator, whose Grail series 
in the Boston Public Library and illustrations for 


166 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


Shakespeare are especially well known. This room 
also contains a number of canvases by Wyant, show- 
ing how far he developed from his early panoramic 
style. “Forenoon in the Adirondacks” and “Mo- 
hawk Valley,” early works, are still much like Ken- 
sett, but his “Broad Silent Valley” is maturer work, 
executed with surety and firmness of brushwork that 
gives precision to much of the detail yet does not 
impair the impression of unity. The subjective 
quality of his work is also felt here: it is the romantic 
mood of the Barbizon school, infusing nature with 
the sentiment of the artist, but always, in Wyant’s 
case, it is a fine modulation of the same delicate 
melody, with little variation of phrasing. 

Six canvases by James McNeill Whistler in Gal- 
lery 12 bring this provocative artist’s work to con- 
sideration. A painting, “Harmony in Yellow and 
Gold; Connie Gilchrist,” in Gallery 15, is less rep- 
resentative, since it is this painter’s only attempt to 
portray movement. Moreover, its delicate nuances 
of tone are much dimmed by fading of the pigment. 
Whistler absorbed many influences, Velazquez, the 
Japanese, Manet,—to point out the most obvious,— 
and Turner, also, in his etherealized dissolutions of 
solidity in light, but he did absorb them and find the 
delicate instrument suited for the expression of his 
sensitive perception and power of subtle suggestion. 
Whistler’s striking personality, his eccentricities of 
life and manner, his delight in “the gentle art of 
making enemies,” his caustic wit, his brilliant “Ten 
O’Clock’s,” in which he expounded his zsthetic 


ARRANGEMENT IN FLESH COLOR AND 
BLACK—THEODORE DURET. 
JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


AMERICAN PAINTING 167 


theories, made him an astonishing figure against the 
rather dim personalities of his contemporary English 
academic art world. 

Outside the academic pale, it was the moment of 
the precious and the exotic with the zsthete and the 
sunflower and the rare combination of dandyism and 
Bohemia rolled into one. Whistler was more ele- 
gant than them all. He was elegant in his work—in 
its reticence, its avoidance of the obvious and its deli- 
cate scale of harmonies. Since there was nothing 
more abstract, more removed from objective content 
than music, he brought musical analogies into his 
work, seeking the same cumulative effect of impres- 
sion in his “Nocturnes,” “Symphonies” and “Ar- 
rangements” as one might receive from a musical 
composition’s orderly unfolding. “Cremorne Gar- 
dens,” here, is one of these nocturnes. Unfortu- 
nately it, too, has dimmed, even from its tenuous 
first tones, so that its fastidious refinement of color 
notes blending into a charming melody hardly more 
than tinkles now. ‘Cremorne Gardens, No. 2” has 
fared better and still reveals the pattern developed 
by the spotting of light and dark masses, little stabs 
_ of accent in the colored lamps and rockets; but the 
singleness of impression is nowhere broken by any 
emphatic detail or insistent tone. 

The Japanese influence is felt in the apparent de- 
centralization of the design with its impression of 
casual arrangement and lack of focal balance. It is 
not possible to consider Whistler’s prints, although 
they open up an interesting field and reveal, at least 


168 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


in the early “Thames” series, the influence of Cour- 
bet (with whom he worked for a time), as few of 
his paintings do. A coast scene in Brittany, executed 
in this period of association with Courbet (shown a 
few years ago at the Kraushaar Galleries) does indi- 
cate how Whistler refined and whittled down Cour- 
bet’s naturalism to his own suaver expression. 

One of the Whistler canvases here is a portrait of 
“Théodore Duret,” art critic of Paris, who was a 
friend and admirer of the artist. The painting is 
called, “Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black,” 
emphasizing Whistler’s preoccupation with color 
harmonies rather than the sitter in his portraiture. 
Duret, in his work on Whistler, tells of the inci- 
dent which led to the painting of this portrait. The 
two friends had been discussing the ridiculous dis- 
crepancies so often occurring in modern portraits that 
represented in antique dress a subject with none of 
the physical or mental habit of real antiquity. 
Whistler suddenly exclaimed that he wondered that 
no one had attempted a portrait of a man in modern 
evening clothes which were especially appropriate 
to the allure and social life of moderns. The two 
friends agreed that Duret was to pose for such a 
portrait, with Whistler’s stipulation that the sitter 
bring with him a pink domino as though he were on 
his way to a fancy ball. Here we have the portrait, 
the black clothes against a faintly pinkish background 
of hangings, the deeper pink of the domino, the de- 
cisive note of red in a fan held in the left hand, and 
the warmth of the flesh tints giving the notes of 
color to the arrangement. It might seem that noth- 


AMERICAN PAINTING 169 


ing was more formidable to the artist than the cor- 
rect stiffness of modern evening dress, but this 
portrait triumphs over the difficulty, breaking the 
monotony of the vertical lines by the flow of the 
pink domino held over Duret’s arm and enveloping 
the whole canvas in a faint flush of pearly atmos- 
phere that softens the hardness of contours and gives 
a fluency to the starkness of the presentment. The 
pattern of line, color and mass makes this a really 
great achievement, to which the artist has not at- 
tempted to add any note of symbolism, as in the por- 
trait of his mother. It is intrinsically a fine portrait 
and needed no symbolism to strengthen its interest. 
In one of Whistler’s many diatribes against the ac- 
cepted standards of his artistic world, he attacked the 
practice of always harking back to Velazquez in por- 
traiture and comparing everything to his methods. 
Yet in this portrait of Duret one sees a great deal 
of the painter’s debt to Velazquez—particularly in 
the leaning on composition and color for the real 
interest of the painting, and in the freedom of 
handling. 

Near by hangs a portrait of Whistler himself, by 
William Chase. How much you feel him the dandy 
and poseur in this presentment! The white lock 
standing out from the mop of black hair is accen- 
tuated, as is his affected pose on a fragile cane. He 
seems determined here, as in life, to play a part. It 
is surprising that so delicate and charming a talent 
owed so much of its vogue to the artist’s assertive 
self-advertising and audacious assurance. 

A type far removed both as artist and man, 


170 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


Thomas Eakins, has here a group of canvases which 
illustrate his unfolding powers. He is a masterful 
figure standing quite alone, since he seems to have 
been responsible for no definite school or following, 
although a great teacher. He had training in paint- 
ing and sculpture in France and some study in Spain, 
yet when he finds himself after his first early paint- 
ings, he is completely American in his individual 
work, taking contemporary material as subject mat- 
ter and giving it the significance of its own time and 
place. He was a realist, regarding objective truth 
and structural veracity as first essentials of his work, 
yet through them arriving at a marvelous synthesis 
of humanity. His austerity and detached intellec- 
tual viewpoint seemed to give him a power of pene- 
tration into the truth of his subject matter, whether 
the character of his sitter or the more universal rela- 
tions between man and his surroundings that his sit- 
ter seemed to imply. 

In the “Chess Players,” much of his master, 
Géréme, and undoubtedly something of Meissonier, 
is evident. In “Pushing for Rail,” a water-color, 
the greater fluency of the medium relieves the mi- 
nuteness of detail, yet it is still meticulous work. 
In “The Writing Master” (his father), he attains 
breadth and richness of color, making detail serve 
to reveal the mood of absorption of the man. The 
painting of the efficient old hands so finely realized, 
is mastery of his medium. “The Thinker,” in its 
aloofness, its concentration, its simplicity and breadth 
of handling, has a monumental effect. It sums up 


AMERICAN PAINTING 171 


a type of the American man for all time, with its 
intensity of severe factual statement paralleled by 
its endowment of austerity and emotional remote- 
ness. The “Portrait of a Lady,” with quite a dif- 
ferent approach, has this same power of epitome, 
the summing up of physical and mental characteris- 
tics in a single powerful impression. The setting 
has much charm of revealing detail, yet the portrait 
is remarkably broad and vital. Many of the other 
paintings here show the diversity of the artist’s in- 
terests, but in all of them the power and truth of an 
original artist find varying expression, making him 
one of the greatest figures of American art. 

A small canvas by Albert Ryder, “‘Toilers of the 
Sea,” gives some idea of the peculiar endowment and 
style of this artist, whose painting seems to be the 
inevitable expression of his mystic, poetic imagina- 
tion. A larger group of his work in the Brooklyn 
Museum will further illustrate his individuality of 
theme and execution. 

Robert L. Newman, represented by three canvases, 
is an artist who deserves to be better known. His 
romantic themes are clothed in a glowing color that 
gives an enameled richness of surfaces. His figures 
are those of dreams rather than of any known world, 
they have the vividness of dream figures and are en- 
veloped in a radiance of atmospheric glow that lends 
the character of mystery to their evocation. Draw- 
ing, brushwork, composition, may all be considered 
negligible, yet through the gift of color and its use 
to express poetic vision this work makes impression. 


172 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


George Luks is a painter of great unevenness of 
output, at his best a dynamic force tempered by a 
fine sensibility, yet quite as often dashing off a 
canvas slovenly in technique and void of inspiration. 
“The Old Duchess” shows his power of characteriza- 
tion. The vicious, old face, the very pose with its 
affectation of elegance, the aroma of decadence with 
which the canvas is imbued, reveal his subtlety. His 
best work is drawn from the material at hand in 
everyday life, street scenes, East Side children, beg- 
gars, waifs, the docks or the brawn and vehemence 
of wrestlers. There is something sensuous and rich, 
something sentimental and delicate alike in his virile 
painting with its drastic directness, its raciness, its 
rich and subtle color. “Style is the man,” indeed, 
for the artist finds his own means to express his per- 
sonal conceptions, taking a thick raw slice of life at 
one moment for material, and again an idyllic inter- 
pretation of childhood or girlish charm, as in this 
“Pawnbroker’s Daughter,” or the well-known “Lit- 
tle Milliner.” 

Walter Gay’s interiors, such as the “Green Salon” 
with its exquisite woodwork, its beautiful propor- 
tions and restraint of décor, seem to sum up the 
period of Louis XV elegance in a perfection of dec- 
orative ensemble. It is more than a perfunctory de- 
scription of interior decoration; it actually conveys a 
feeling of the moment that produced its refinement 
of luxury. Such an interior as “Boston Athanzeum,” 
by Charles Bittinger, shows the opposite method of 
hard, insistent detail, a hermetically sealed room as 


AMERICAN PAINTING 173 


safe from atmosphere as a vacuum bell, everything 
recorded in a neat and perfectly uninspiring manner. 

George Bellows, whose recent death seemed to cut 
short a career just at its point of full expression, is 
represented so inadequately by an early canvas, “Up 
the Hudson,” that it is difficult to convey any sense 
of his remarkable, vital work, in which were blended 
a robust realism and a profoundly scientific approach 
to the problems of painting. He is thoroughly a 
product of America, not only because he never left 
its shores but because his racial traits crop out in all 
his work, and his subjects are drawn from the things 
at hand, especially from many varying angles of city 
life. His lithographs and drawings, as well as his 
paintings, all reveal his alertness of mind, his artistic 
probity, his sensitive vision. 

“Morning Light,” an early and thoroughly un- 
representative work of one of our foremost American 
painters, Eugene Speicher, needs no comment for 
the reason it hardly gives a hint of his great artistic 
endowment.* Frederick Frieseke, an American im- 
pressionist living in Paris, is represented by “The 
Toilet,” a gracious, harmonious, if not a particularly 
vital work. In contrast with this diaphanous vision 
of blues, pinks and glowing flesh tones is the rather 
hard realism of Walter Ufer’s “His Wealth,” the 
Indian subject which Mr. Ufer usually chooses. He 
is an able painter, presenting his theme vividly with 

* Since this book went to press a superb example of Mr. 


Speicher’s work, a portrait, “Polly,” has been acquired by the 
museum, 


174 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


effective composition. His color is hard, and as yet 
white men do not really paint the Red Man—it is 
his trappings and picturesque setting that they seize 
upon. Perhaps he is too picturesque and is able to 
hide behind this apparat and elude them. It is the 
old story of the French “Orientalists,” who seized on 
the surface of Oriental life, its exotic color and 
strangeness, and with few exceptions never pene- 
trated further. 

Augustus Vincent Tack’s “House of Matthew” in- 
dicates the character of his work as a mural painter, 
developing religious themes with an abstract sym- 
bolism that has more conviction than the most faith- 
ful realism. His finely built rhythmical structure 
and his Venetian color fused into cool harmonies of 
blues, lavender, dull red, soft rose and ivory give a 
highly personal character to his decorative work. 
He has drawn on many sources, Eastern and West- 
ern, yet remains thoroughly original in his assimila- 
tion of them for his particular needs. 

Mary Cassatt’s work is shown in this gallery by 
a group of canvases and pastels. ‘This artist, whose 
life and work are associated with France, naturally 
shows the artistic influences that were dominant in 
Paris when she made it her home after her shifting 
career from one art center to another in Europe. 
Manet’s practice and precept, of course (he was her 
master), and that of Degas are felt decidedly in her 
early work; yet even here is the sturdy personal 
accent, the hand of the original creative craftsman, 
the individual gift for pure painting, that became 


THE THINKER. THOMAS EAKINS 


Metropolitan Museum of Art 


~ 


~— 


AMERICAN PAINTING 175 


more and more apparent in her development. Her 
choice of subjects—motherhood, the adolescent 
charm of girlhood, gracious ladies in the intimacy of 
tea hour or boudoir causerie—may appear to indicate 
a sentimental attitude toward her work, but nothing 
is further from the frank naturalism of her treat- 
ment. She displays an explicitness of factual state- 
ment, soundness, impeccable taste, and a detached 
serenity in her handling of this intimate material. 
In. her painting, especially in her fluent pastels, the 
casual impression may be of charm and facility, but 
accuracy of structure and careful anatomical defini- 
tion underlie all her work. In the large body of 
drawings and prints that Miss Cassatt executed, one 
sees her relentless pursuit of craftsmanship and 
veracity of naturalistic statement. That she was 
finally to include charm and ingratiating color is 
further achievement, but the precision of statement 
fed to be won. Ihe “Lady at the Tea Table,” a 
canvas of the eighties, is reputed to be the portrait 
of a member of her family, who did not consider it 
art for a long time after its execution. It illustrates 
the authority and distinction of Miss Cassatt’s work. 
The solidity of the form, the delightful pattern of 
color and the sympathetic interpretation of character 
accentuated by the setting give the dignity of the con- 
ception direct appeal. The refinement of handling, 
fluent execution, clarity and charm of color of her 
pastel work appear in a number of paintings here of 
mothers and babies or single figures of children in 
deliciously quaint costumes. Especially hats! Did 


176 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


anyone ever know of such surprising, varied and 
fascinating headgear as that with which Miss Cassatt 
endows her fillettes and jeunes filles! 

Homer Martin’s “Harp of the Winds; a View of 
the Seine,” indicates the influence of his five years 
in France, the contact with the Barbizon school, 
Corot in particular, and with the newer practices 
of the Impressionists, in a looser, freer method of 
work, broader brushing and a simplifying of detail 
towards a realization of unity of harmonious im- 
pression. Compared with his “White Mountain” 
period, in the canvas of Gallery 16, the immense 
change in his work may be appreciated. The per- 
sonal gravity and melancholy note of his work is felt 
in both periods, however wide the variation of man- 
ner and theme. 

William M. Chase is represented in this gallery 
by still life, interior and figure paintings. This list- 
ing in itself reveals something of the versatility of 
the artist and his wide range of interest. He de- 
lighted in subjects that gave him opportunity for 
brilliant execution, the gleaming surfaces of brass 
and silver, the textures of studio stuffs, or the silvery 
scales of fish, as well as the color and shapes of cloud 
and dune on Shinnecock hills. His study in Munich 
and Paris made him an apostle of a more sophisti- 
cated art, which laid the emphasis on good painting. 
His dashing performance and big brushstrokes made 
tremendous impression. He abandoned the browns 
and murky blacks of Munich for the richer color 
and more luminous painting of the French masters 


AMERICAN PAINTING 177 


he admired. Chase’s long career as a teacher had 
deep influence on American art. His pupils devel- 
oped technical dexterity with individual freedom of 
expression. “The Hall at Shinnecock” is the sort of 
subject that he handled most felicitously. The pure, 
sparkling color, the nice filling of space, the finish of 
surface, give this painting decorative value, while 
the relation of the figure to the décor lends a touch 
of charming intimacy. The vigor and élan of 
Chase’s work did not flag with all his years of teach- 
ing, lecturing and steady application to his painting. 
He continued to delight in the exercise of his craft, 
and to be inspired by an increasingly wide variety of 
objects to a virtuosity of brilliant objective painting. 

A “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” by Alfred Q. 
Collins, is the work of a man who should be far 
better known. A recent memorial exhibition at the 
Brooklyn Museum was for most of the visitors a 
revelation of a talent which has had scant recogni- 
tion. This serene, beautiful work shows how far 
ahead of his day the artist was, both in his approach 
to his work and in his endowment of taste. It is 
one of the great paintings of this American collec- 
tion. While our newly arrived millionaires, secure 


in their walnut and plush fastnesses, acquired sweet 


insipidities by Bouguereau and Cabanel, this artist 
was probing the scientific aspects of form and paint- 
ing such enduring, distinguished works as the ex- 
ample in this museum. 

Guy Péne Du Bois, who must be reckoned not 
only artist, but critic, teacher and propounder of 


178 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


sound zsthetic theories, is made known here by one 
of his satirical paintings, “The Doll and the Mon- 
ster.” It is a rather cynical form of satire that 
presses no moral and starts no propaganda, the Gallic 
rather than the American in its amused indifference. 
Painting is no negligible matter, however, for the 
plastic form of the two figures, the sound drawing 
and the clarity of color give distinction to this small 
canvas. 

John Sloan is another satirist of our contemporary 
life and manners, although his vehemence and emo- 
tional interest are a contrast to the detachedness of 
Mr. Du Bois. His animated records of penetrating 
observation with their sweeping rhythms and good 
color make a valuable contribution to many phases 
of New York life. This “Dust Storm, Fifth Ave- 
nue,” painted a little more than twenty years ago, 
is as authentic as the city records; it preserves for us 
a psychological moment, a moment of our history, 
the face of other customs and manners, suspending 
the flood of oblivion from sweeping over this spot 
and hour. In his etchings of a later period, his easy, 
humorous notation of urban life with sympathetic 
understanding, as well as satire, carries on the record 
to the present moment. As president of the Inde- 
pendent Society of Artists he has been untiring in 
his efforts to gain opportunity for the artist to exhibit 
his work whatever his school or creed. 


a eee ee Te 


CHAPTER ELEVEN 


ALTMAN COLLECTION 


LTHOUGH we mounted the staircase and 
proceeded directly to the picture galleries on 
entering the museum, the wings at left and right in- 
dicated the enormous territory left unexplored, as 
the inviting sign posts labeled “American Wing” 
teased one’s imagination while wandering through 
the various rooms of paintings. —The museum’s mag- 
nificent collection of arms and armor in the right 
wing is worth a long exploration, as are the galleries 
of Egyptian and Oriental art, the Pierpont Morgan 
Wing of European sculpture and decorative arts, or, 
as the schoolboy essay reads, “other things too nu- 
merous to mention.” 

But having started a tour of picture galleries, it 
must be concluded in undeviating singleness of pur- 
pose, or, once seduced from the path of original di- 
rection, the tour might be a permanent sojourn 
among varied fascinations. In reaching the last col- 
lection, the Altman, housed in Wing K, it is neces- 
sary to pass through the galleries of Classical Art, 
so that one may give them a furtive glance and appre- 
ciate how their arrangement leads from the most 
primitive forms of Greek art with highly Oriental 


character to the perfected expression of the later 
179 


180 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


periods. Especially does one come to realize even in 
this casual and flitting survey how rich is the mu- 
~seum?s collection of Athenian vases, both black- 
figured and red-figured—the purely decorative 
character of the former or the more finished art 
of the drawing in the latter, leaving the beholder to 
seek his individual preference. A Roman Court is 
arranged in the picturesque setting of a Roman peri- 
style around a marble fountain, set in green with 
graveled walks. Its paths are lined with sculpture 
and the warmth of its red-based columns brings 
animation to the aloofness and remoteness of an- 
tiquity. There is opportunity here for rest and re- 
flection before turning one’s steps to the last stage 
of exploration. On the floor above this Roman 
court, in Gallery K 30, the Altman collection begins. 
This room contains decorated Chinese porcelain as 
the next gallery the monochrome, or single color, 
porcelains. Pass them, if you can, in this particular 
voyaging, and entering Gallery K 32 find the early 
paintings of the collection, Spanish, Flemish and 
Italian. 

The portrait of “Ulrich Fugger,” by Hans Maler 
zu Schwarz, is the work of a little known Austrian 
painter of the early sixteenth century. But the 
banker of Augsburg, so handsomely presented in his 
formal, sober elegance, is a member of a powerful 
family, sprung from a humble weaver and ramify- 
ing into princes and counts in later days. This Ulrich 
and his family, like the well-known Jacques Coeur 
of France, were lenders and losers to monarchs, 


ALTMAN COLLECTION 181 


helping out the coffers of both the Emperor Maxi- 
milian and Charles the Fifth. 

Other Northern paintings include the “Betrothal 
of St. Catherine,” by Memling, a subject that must 
have appealed to him for he painted it at least three 
times. This version, an early work, reveals his deli- 
cacy and refinement of handling as well as his delight 
in color—in the reds, greens, purples and golds, 
with the white of St. Catherine’s bodice set against 
the rich, deep blue of the angel’s garment. The 
figures are placed in a landscape, green, cool and 
luminous, that strikes a note of serenity for the gen- 
tle group. The drawing is firm and fluent with vig- 
orous record of gesture that gives vivacity to the 
graceful, rather intimate sentiment of the piece. 
The two portraits of “Thomas Portinari’”? and his 
wife, by Memling, vivacious in their contrasts of 
white, black and rich red, and their firmness of con- 
tours, are also remarkable for the striking charac- 
terization, the penetration of one racial psychology 
by another race. A great work of another type is his 
“Portrait of an Old Man,” thrust rather awkwardly 
into its frame, but vivid and authoritative. You feel 
the painter vastly more in sympathy with this kindly, 
humorous man than with the diplomatic Thomas 
Portinari or of his wife as a donor (for this panel 
was to go with the big altar-piece by Hugo van der 
Goes, given by the Portinari family). 

A canvas by Albrecht Diirer, “Madonna and 
Child with St. Anne,” demonstrates how much more 
readily this artist’s gifts were expressed through the 


182 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


medium of engraving or etching than by painting. 
This work has something more of the character of a 
drawing in color than the handling appropriate to 
this medium. Moreover, the unique quality of 
Diirer’s remarkable line is not to be appreciated in 
his painting as in his prints. 

The “Portrait of a Man,” by Dirk Bouts, lacks 
the jewel-like color of much of his work, but im- 
presses one with a luminous unity of effect, as well as 
sobriety in its simple, powerful presentment. 

Sir Anthony Van Dyck is represented in this col- 
lection by two splendid portraits—one of “Lucas van 
Uffel,” of Antwerp, the work of the period just 
preceding his departure for England, and the other 
of the “Marchesa Durazzo,” executed during his 
stay in Genoa. In this portraiture, carried out be- 
fore his popularity as court painter made excessive 
demands on his time and strength, the dignity and 
nobility of the work are easily realized. ‘The state- 
liness and insolent assurance of the Marchesa, the 
gravity and authority of van Uffel, are vividly por- — 
trayed. There are breadth, freedom and richness 
of color that make these canvases great examples of 
portrait painting. 

The portrait of “Margaret Wyatt, Lady Lee,” 
by Holbein, is a superb example of his art, more sub- 
dued to design than the “Lady Guildford” already 
viewed. The subtlety of this design may not be 
appreciated until it is studied and the relevance of 
even the slightest detail to its full development 
realized. You feel that the man who painted this 


+ Re ees: 


ALTMAN COLLECTION 183 


portrait had no thought-out pattern in mind into 
which he merely fitted observed phenomena that 
felicitously suited his preconceived design, as did 
many of the early Florentine painters in their scien- 
tific temper, but that out of this fidelity of record of 
objective fact the design was evolved with an irrev- 
ocable necessity. It is difficult to feel drawn to this 
rather shrewish lady with her oblique look follow- 
ing you around the gallery, but it is equally difficult 
to miss seeing that it is a marvelous portrait. 

The Italian schools are well represented. The 
“Portrait of a Young Man,” curiously supposed to 
be a self-portrait at one time, is by Antonello da 
Messina, with whose name we have already become 
familiar as sponsor for the introduction into Italy of 
the technique of oil painting practiced in the Neth- 
erlands. The first impression of this portrait of a 
youth is of amazing vitality and rich warm color. 
Looking at it longer, one realizes that there is great 
care in rendering of detail, but this meticulous nicety 
is subtly related to the big masses of the composition 
so that the effect is of breadth and unity. 

Francia, whose portrait of the boy, “Federigo 
Gonzaga,” is here, we have met before. It is a 
graceful portrait, which is said to have greatly 
pleased the boy’s mother, Isabella d’Este. The 
charming landscape background adds much interest 
to the painting. The “Holy Family,” by Mantegna, 
is a late work and well illustrates the sculptural 
character of his painting. It is almost as much in 
the round as a bas-relief. He was a son-in-law of 


184. NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


Jacopo Bellini, by whom he was much influenced in 
composition, as he was also by the sculptor Donatello. 
Everything in this painting appears to be cut out of 
stone with all the intricacies of contour and convo- 
lutions of fruit and leaves and variations of form 
carefully accounted for in the decorative composi- 
tion. The dignity and austere beauty of the figures 
of the Virgin, Mary Magdalen and St. Joseph, give 
to this formal arrangement a significance and power 
that the almost rigid formalism of its pattern would 
seem to preclude. It lacks the brilliant drawing of 
Mantegna’s earlier work, yet illustrates his style 
admirably. The engravings of Mantegna really 
bring us to a closer appreciation of his remarkable 
power of line. The profile portrait by Cosimo Tura, 
which on Bernhard Berenson’s authority is that of 
Borso d’Este, first Duke of Ferrara and Mantua, 
shows a youth with a red cap over a shock of light 
hair, his black doublet fitting closely at the neck. 
The spirited effect of the silhouette portrait is real- 
ized here. In much of Tura’s work the sculptural 
quality of his gnarled peasants and his delight in 
learned detail and curious color schemes give to his 
work a peculiar character that is not found in this 
conventional one. Montagna, whose beautiful “Ma- 
donna and Child” was noted in a previous gallery, is — 
represented here by “A Lady of Rank as St. Justina 
of Padua,” following a fashion of representing fine 
ladies in the guise of saints to add piquancy to their 
portraiture. This is a lively young woman decked 
with many pearls and other jewels, holding the palm 


ALTMAN COLLECTION 185 


leaf of sainthood and with the dagger of St. Justina 
negligently stuck in her breast. It is, however, a 
rather uninspired and conventional work. 
Giorgione, a rare artist to come by since but one 
really documented picture by him is known, is repre- 
sented here by “Portrait of a Man.” This painter’s 
brief career is so little known and so adumbrated with 
mystery that an emotional interest in the man is add- 
ed to the natural interest in the artist who was so 
great an innovator. He turned from the formal type 
of Venetian art with its ceremonial note to idyllic 
themes, either from the classic poets or even from 
contemporary life. Instead of factual statements he 
attempted to render the mood and poetic content of 
the objective world. His paintings are lyrical and 
tender, with sensuous color and a beautiful blending 
of figures and landscape into an intimate harmony. 
The serenity, the reticence, the wistful, romantic un- 
dertone of his work, seem to break the continuity 
of Venetian tradition. In the technique of his work, 
he was also an innovator, an experimenter, restless 
and eager. He was a pupil of Giovanni Bellini and 
in his early work continued Bellini’s practice of reén- 
forcing tempera painting with oil, but in an incred- 
ibly short time he abandoned this method and used 
the medium of oil as it continued to be used, not 
only by his contemporary, Titian, but by succeeding 
painters down to the nineteenth-century break with 
tradition in Impressionism. He exerted so powerful 
an influence upon his age and its painters that it is 
difficult to be sure of his work, for many artists 


186 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


painted in his manner, using his themes, his glowing 
color and his stateliness of design. The list of works 
attributed to him grows smaller with investigation. 

“The Last Communion of St. Jerome,” by Botti- 
celli, is one of a number of small paintings of masses 
that Botticelli carried out. It is strange that he 
should happen to be represented in the museum by 
two works of religious character (the other “Three 
Miracles of St. Zenobius”), for so much of his work 
was idyllic, decorative and expressive of ideal beauty. 
In his later days, like so many of his fellow-citizens, 
he was affected by the fiery crusade of Savonarola, 
and abandoning his poetic vein of idealistic work, he 
became mystical, full of brooding melancholy and 
severely religious. It will be recalled that he found 
comfort for his devotional frame of mind in illus- 
trating Dante’s Inferno. In this painting St. Jerome 
is shown in his cell supported by two kneeling monks 
as he receives the last communion from a priest. 
The work shows something of medizval exaltation 
and mysticism. The artist’s genius for linear design 
is felt even in such a small composition, with its 
beauty of vaulting lines that are so subtly interre- 
lated in their movement and directions that they 
give life to the groups and decorative grace to the 
whole work. The color. scheme, with its notes of 
rose and deep blue against a paler blue sky silvering 
into gray, heightens the ornamental effect without 
lessening the serious devoutness of the theme. The 
tondo by Sebastiano Mainardi, “Virgin and Child 
with Angels,” is the work of a minor artist, the 


ALTMAN COLLECTION 137 


brother of Domenico Ghirlandaio, with whom he 
worked. The lovely chapel of Santa Fina, in the 
Collegiata at San Gimignano, the birthplace of this 
artist, is one of the best examples of their collabora- 
tion. In this painting there is a serenity and gra- 
ciousness in the adoring Virgin and angels and a 
beauty of color that make it a delightful work. 
There is the same flair for decoration in this fine 
space filling as we find in Ghirlandaio, but there are 
also a tenderness and gentle grace. | 

The “Virgin and Child with Saint Joseph,” by 
Filippino Lippi, shows him using the languid, grace- 
ful type of womanhood of his master Botticelli, who 
in turn had been influenced by the idealistic types of 
his master Fra Filippo Lippi, Filippino Lippi’s 
father. Both these influences are found in his work 
until he yielded to an attempt for greater realism 
and dramatic action. This latter style is shown in 
the “Descent from the Cross” of his school, in Gal- 
lery 35. Fra Angelico’s “The Crucifixion” and the 
“Madonna and Child” attributed to Verrocchio are 
other items of this gallery. 

Gallery K 35 holds a collection of Dutch paint- 
ings, including thirteen by Rembrandt. We see here 
more examples of Hals in expansive mood, such as 
““Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart” or the “Merry 
Company.” Here is Maes in a better example than 
those already seen, for in these small genre ‘pieces 
with their warm lighting he is far nearer his master 
Rembrandt than in his large, formal portraiture. 
Here also is a luminous de Hooch, with its conflict 


188 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


of outdoor light entering through the window and 
the interior light with its shadowy depths resolv- 
ing into harmony of subdued coloring. Terborch 
is another of these painters of cabinet pictures whom 
we have already met. Here is his “Lady Playing 
the Theorbo,” an instrument, by the way, that is not 
so formidable as it sounds. ‘This is a vivacious, 
sparkling piece with its Dutch lady in her blue velvet 
jacket edged with ermine rather coquettishly picking 
the strings while a gentleman regards her. These 
are people of fashion and rank, and Terborch gives 
them that character in their air of good breeding. 
It is the instant of suspended animation, perhaps the 
tinkling notes came for a moment to a full stop as 
the lady and gentleman with the ticking watch be- 
tween them took a breath’s respite from their con- 
centration. The modeling and color are of great 
refinement and contribute as much to the mood of 
the scene as does the design with its curving arms 
of the player, the line of the high mantel-piece and 
the rectangle of the usual wall map. 

Here is a self-portrait by Gerard Dou, a pupil of 
Rembrandt, who succeeds better here in this type of 
work than in his genre paintings. Cuyp, whose work 
has also been seen and discussed, has one landscape 
here and there is a landscape by Ruisdael which gives 
a far better idea of his achievement than the canvases 
already noted in Gallery 26. Here the browns and 
deep, dark greens ‘give way to local color, the blond- 
ness of ripened wheat with the sunlight upon it and 
a great expanse of open, vibrant sky. It has the 


ALTMAN COLLECTION 189 


same note of melancholy as the other landscapes 
we have seen, but there is greater breadth and some- 
thing of liveliness in the play of light. 

Other Dutch paintings include Meindert Hob- 
bema’s rather stolid “Entrance to a Village.” A beau- 
tiful small painting by Gerard David called “Christ 
Taking Leave of His Mother,” almost like a minia- 
ture in its delicacy, shows him thoroughly Flemish, 
but striving to impart some of the elegance of Ital- 
ian painting as well as its breadth and balanced mass. 
“A Girl Asleep” by Vermeer is a deeper color 
scheme than his other paintings we have seen, the 
red bodice of the girl and the reds in the figured rug 
on the table making a different gamut than the cool 
blues and yellows of the canvases already noted. 
But the beauty of light and atmosphere that fills the 
room, the strength of the design with the marvel of 
the texture of surfaces, are here to delight and as- 
tonish us. | 

Velazquez is represented by two paintings, a por- 
trait of “Philip IV of Spain,” and “Christ and the 
Pilgrims of Emmaus.” The portrait, executed 
when Velazquez was in his early twenties may not or 
may be a portrait of Philip, but it is evidently not 
directly from the living model. This is the period 
preceding his visit to Italy and his study of Italian 
masters. It does not possess the vividness of later 
portraits, but its execution is so smooth and its 
handling so solid and masterly that it gains a certain 
animation. ‘This early portrait indicates the artist’s 
remarkable solution of the problem of the state, 


190 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


ceremonial portrait. His feeling for the exact limi- 
tations of the frame give a delicate balance of masses 
and contours while, even at this early period, he 
was able to impart a swift unity of impression by 
his elimination of all detail irrelevant to his de- 
sign. The broad chain that crosses the monarch’s 
chest, the glove in his hand, the saucer-like ruff, are 
seized on and utilized for their value to his pattern. 
Compared to the marvelous “Philip IV when 
Young” of the National Gallery, it is pale and 
supine, but it has the effect of simultaneity which 
the greater painting reaches despite its multitudinous 
richness of detail in costume. The directness, the 
realism, the masterly spacing and concentration on 
essentials, with the power of rendering bodily poise 
and tension, make this an impressive work. The 
exquisite perception of values that distinguishes this 
painter’s work and the authority and vigor of his 
brushwork are apparent even here in an early work 
with little of the mastery to which he later attained. 
The work of Velazquez has suffered so much both 
from being cleaned and from not being cleaned, 
that many subtle relations of tone are probably lost 
in some of his canvases, which now have in portions 
a dull monotonous effect of uniform tone. 

“The Pilgrims of Emmaus” is evidently painted 
from perfunctory models, perhaps in anticipation of 
a later canvas, of which it was to be a part. While 
there is no attempt, evidently, to realize the tremen- 
dous inner significance of the scene, the vigor of 
the brushwork, the solidity of the modeling of the 


ALTMAN COLLECTION I9I 


forms and the careful relations of planes and values 
in the rich reds and blues give interest to this early 
work. We have already seen many examples of 
Rembrandt’s work beginning with the superb “Por- 
trait of a Man” and “Hendrickje Stoffels” of the 
Marquand Gallery, and passing on to other por- 
traits of men, as well as “Flora,” “The Noble Slav,” 
“The Sybil,” “The Philosopher.” Now this large 
group of both early and mature work completes the 
museum’s fine collection. The “Portrait of a Young 
Woman” is the earliest work, and “Old Woman in 
an Arm-chair” also belongs to the early period. In 
both cases we have the letter of the law in signature 
and dates. The characterization and pose are fine 
in both portraits but much less of a performance as 
portraiture than his mature work. 

The self-portrait, at the age of fifty-four, shows 
Rembrandt a worn, broken man, prematurely aged, 
wrinkled and shabby, for all the preposterous 
jauntiness of the velvet studio cap. The facts of his 
life seem always too painful to dwell upon. He was 
apparently never able to cope with the world on its 
terms, for at every step in spite of prodigies of in- 
cessant work, he was harassed, haunted by poverty, 
misery and misfortune. Yet he continued to work 
relentlessly and with no letting up of his magical 
power that has made him the etcher of all time and 
one of the great painters of the world. 

From such paintings as “The Noble Slav” or the 
“T ady with a Pink”—taken at random from many 
—one realizes the fact that Rembrandt consum- 


192 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


mated a long artistic search of many generations in 
his absolute perfection of focusing light and diffus- 
ing its effects from the darkest to the most luminous 
radiance. Never was this accomplished, as it is easy 
to see, by violence of brilliant whites and lustrous 
blacks but by such subtle, gradual, hardly perceptible 
degrees that the whole canvas is glowing with a 
luminous atmosphere while this gamut of chromatic 
brilliance, so delicate in its intervals, rises from warm 
shadows to radiance in which form is modeled, but 
not by line. He adopted this method, probably, so 
that he could work by night under artificial light as 
well as by day, but it also has its own gravity of effect 
and majesty of impression. It reduced Rembrandt’s 
palette to a few simple notes of color, but with these 
he was able to concentrate on design and reveal the 
tremendous significance of his perception of man to 
the world about him. 

Rembrandt is often called a “realist” because 3 
painted gnarled old women or commonplace figures 
from everyday life. Yet can anything be more un- 
real than such a figure as “Old Woman Cutting Her 
Nails”? She is seated in a radiance that was cer- 
tainly never on land or sea. She is purely a symbol 
of the artist’s imagination given some concrete form, 
bodied forth to convey universal meaning. It is no 
old woman, but all old age, decrepitude, or physical 
decay. Its piled-up pigment, its hollows and crags 
of paint, give the effect of mass that sculpture pro- 
duces. It is an impressive work with a fundamental 
appeal that places it far out of ordinary realism. 


ALTMAN COLLECTION 193 


Dr. John C. van Dyke, of Princeton, a Rembrandt 
scholar, impugned the validity of many attributions 
of the museum’s collection of Rembrandts. It did 
not make a profound upheaval of the art world, 
although his strictures were so severe that he left 
us in the whole world only a comparatively few 
works by this great master. Among other can- 
vases attacked was this of “Old Woman Cutting Her 
Nails,” yet as Dr. W. R. Valentiner points out, Rem- 
brandt’s own preliminary drawings for the painting 
are not only in existence but are well known. In 
other cases of his attacks upon the attribution of 
Rembrandt to museum paintings, Dr. van Dyke’s 
arguments imply great unfamiliarity with the 
works of the authorities on this artist. Dr. Val- 
entiner’s analysis of Dr. van Dyke’s whole thesis 
brought to bear a scholarly opinion upon a super- 
ficial judgment. 

The power to hold a large group of figures into 
a single vividness of impression, the individual use 
of chiaroscuro out of which an emotional power 
seems to emerge from the transparent shadows and. 
mystery, the tremendous power of design and con- 
centration upon it, are some of the angles of the 
work of this great painter who suffered neglect in 
his lifetime and practical oblivion immediately after 
his death. His work is so varied and on a scale of 
such universal significance that only a long and 
careful study of it can bring real knowledge of its 
character. 


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0: OTHER NOTABLE 


COLLECTIONS 


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Part Two: OTHER NOTABLE 
COLLECTIONS 


CHAPTER TWELVE 


HISPANIC MUSEUM 


N the Museum of the Hispanic Society where the 
record of Spain’s contact with the new world is 
preserved in a large and varied collection of ceramics, 
textiles, carvings, books and furnishings, Spanish 
tradition is also indicated by the many treasures from 
Spain. The beautiful Spanish books alone make a 
pilgrimage to the museum worth while, but since 
our quest happens to be paintings these must be our 
sole concern. On the first floor there is a group of 
Spanish primitives, altar-pieces and predelle. As 
it was stated earlier, Spanish art started out gayly 
enough, although later it became austere and ascetic. 
Here it is possible to see this early elaboration of 
gilding, gold embossing, and the lively character of 
the color and handling. The boldness of the work, 
the directness and racial flavor of the types repre- 
sented, indicate tendencies of Spanish art that be- 
came submerged in Flemish and Italian influences. 
On the upper floor the Spanish paintings are ar- 
ranged around an open gallery. The canvases are 
hung too high to be appreciated properly in natural 
197 


198 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


progress around the walls, while gazing at them 
from the opposite side of the gallery gives false 
values and unexpected high lights that are equally 
disturbing. If only they might be hung at the level 
of the eye! Moreover, the lack of a catalogue is 
a feature of no slight disturbance in visiting this 
collection, as numbers, not subjects or names of 
painters, are attached to the frames. A catalogue 
may be had temporarily, no amount of persuasion 
permits one to be bought, but this catalogue is in- 
cluded with a number of brochures on individual 
artists in a loose leather folder which proves to be 
the most inconvenient arrangement ever devised. 
It is better to lay down the whole burden and enjoy 
the paintings, which in most cases are characteristic 
enough to be recognized, if their subject is not 
known. Fortunately the group of canvases by El 
Greco, Goya and Velazquez are hung at ends of the 
gallery and may be fully enjoyed. The “Holy 
Family” by El Greco belongs to his Toledo period, 
but it is not as compact as the group in the Dreicer 
Collection of the Metropolitan Museum, nor is its 
color as unearthly and dematerialized. Rather there 
is warmth in this canvas, the crimson and yellows 
that form so large a proportion of the color scheme 
are accentuated and not chilled by the dark blue- 
green mantle of the Virgin which in turn has a 
yellow border, while a transparent white mantilla 
lies on her warm brown hair. It is not the mystic 
symbolism of the group that impresses one so much 
as its humanity and tenderness, a delicate poetic pres- 


SANTO DOMINGO DE GUZMAN. EL GRECO 


Hispamc Society of America 


“a 


HISPANIC MUSEUM 199 


entation of the theme rather than an expression of 
profound religious symbolism. Realistic treatment 
in the handling adds to this impression. Quite in 
contrast to the serene beauty and aristocratic types 
of this canvas is “St. Jerome,” an emaciated figure, 
with exaggerated bodily gesture to render the 
ecstasy of his asceticism. The cold gray sky gives 
the note of harshness to this aged recluse with lean, 
yellow body, consumed by such a fanatical fire of 
devotion that it has burned out all material substance. 

“St. James, the Greater,” looming up against the 
hills of Toledo, is a different type of saint. He is 
majestic and imposing; leaning upon his staff with 
his attenuated hands he has a dramatic intensity and 
force. He is a symbol in concrete expression, en- 
dowed with a mystical, supernatural power that each 
detail of linear design and color emphasizes. ‘Santo 
Domingo” is a harsher, more ascetic type, the cold 
tones of gray and muddy white accentuating the 
folds of black in cowl and robe that barely leave 
the face free. The whole figure is outlined in ex- 
agegerated size against a lurid sky with patches of 
broken clouds and a weird, wan light. The saint 
seems on this height to be rapt in contemplation as 
though shuddering at the world from which he has 
escaped. The “Pieta,” which is supposed to owe its 
composition to Michael Angelo’s well-known work, 
has a dramatic play of light from clouds and sky that 
give the figures a supernatural quality. Again in this 
canvas you feel how much color is the psychological 
keynote of El Greco’s expression of mood in each 


ey 
/ 
200 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES / 


conception. The vitality of these figures, the strange 
vigor and movement of these long brush strokes 
creating such unexpected and finely related rhythms, 
the subtlety of the composition that for all its dy- 
namic power leaves so unified an impression, de- 
light us in this work. It is because both the soul and 
the substance of the theme are here that it attains 
such significance while it is executed with a sureness 
that effectively relates each element of the design. 

The “Portrait of Caspar de Guzman, Count-Duke 
of Olivares,” an early work by Velazquez, is one of 
those ceremonial portraits to which he was able to 
give authority of rank and power while preserving 
the personal qualities of mind and characteristics of 
poise and gesture that make his portraits such amaz- 
ing performances. The impression of pomp and 
dignity of this black-robed figure is increased by his 
display of orders—the badge of his office (a riding 
whip, as Master of Horse) so negligently included, 
with delicate notes of white at neck and sleeves to 
relieve the somberness of costume and setting. 
There is a penetrating psychology, brilliant handling 
and realistic detail, as well as fine relation of spacing 
in the placing of the figure and the décor, that make 
this a striking summing up of the man in a har- 
monious composition. But how vital it is, too! For 
all the trappings and formal setness of court eti- 
quette, there are life and vigor in this majestic per- 
sonage. 

The “Portrait of a Little Girl,” a life-sized head 
and shoulders of a child of perhaps nine years old 


HISPANIC MUSEUM 201 


of pure Spanish type, is an exquisite work. The big 
dark eyes, the soft black hair, the mat skin with its 
delicate almost imperceptible flush of warmth, are 
set against a cool background with delicate but firm 
modeling of childish contours in the structure of the 
face and the definition of the head. The cool, 
silvery tone of the whole canvas gives it added 
charm. The “Portrait of a Cardinal” is a lively 
presentment of a rather worldly Prince of the 
Church, who regards you with amusement. 
_ Goya’s “Don Manuel Lapena, Marquis of Bon- 
dad Real” stands out in sharply accentuated sil- 
houette against a grayish sky; the backdrop of a 
parade ground with tiny soldiers in the distance 
lends more notes of red to the color scheme, which 
includes a bright red vest, a red cockade, a dark blue 
coat and black cocked hat. The meticulous elabora- 
tion of detail is not in Goya’s vein, but the effect is 
to emphasize the woodenness of the officer that it 
ornaments. We may never know whether the Mar- 
quis, whose reputation for cruelty has come down to 
us together with his portrait, was just such a figure- 
head of stupid military autocracy as Goya represents 
him, but it is a tremendous ironical arraignment as 
well as an original handling of a portrait with the 
verve and resourcefulness so characteristic of the 
painter. The “Portrait of the Duchess of Alba,” 
in the costume of a Maja, is quite possibly not the 
Duchess, but the type is similar. She points with 
her exquisite hand to the name written in the sand at 
her feet, “Goya,” but her face is imperturbable. 


202 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


The landscape background is exquisitely painted and 
imparts the animation of its hues to the black-robed 
figure. The sketch for “May 3, 1808,” is part of 
the artist’s own vivid recollection of the horrors of 
the invasions of Murat’s troops and the grim hope- 
lessness of the defense. The little group of des- 
perate Spaniards waiting their turn for death, with 
their comrades already dead at their feet and one 
figure flinging up his hands in a death agony, the 
few realistic details so intensely presented result in 
a thousand times more cumulative horror than Dela- 
croix’s famous. “Massacre of Scio” with its stage-set 
of color and exotic detail. 

Among the other paintings are two by an early 
painter Luis de Morales, an individual and austere 
artist whose subjects were usually of sufferings and 
persecutions with every dreadful detail of physical 
anguish heaped up. This “Virgin and Child,” per- 
haps indicating Italian influence, is gracious and ten- 
der, while “Holy Family,” with its piercing shaft 
of light, reveals his mystic, ascetic temperament. 

Zurbaran is represented here by a number of can- 
vases. “Monk Reading” is a theme that he often 
developed, the white wool folds of the Carthusian 
robes affording interesting problems of light and 
textures. This figure is carried out with easier, sim- 
pler treatment than the other similar figures repre- 
sented here. The folds of the robe, however, seem 
to be crumpled a little rather than to fall in lines, 
resulting from the posture. But in general the 
handling is solid and substantial, while the radia- 


HISPANIC MUSEUM 203 


tion of light from the face gives an illumination to 
the whole work. A number of “Saints” in the guise 
of fashionable young ladies of Seville, much like 
his “Virgin of Seville” in the Metropolitan Mu- 
seum, are rather smart and colorful, if not remark- 
able for craftsmanship. They form a valuable com- 
mentary on the elegant costumes of the time. 

An early painter already noted at the Metropol- 
itan Museum, Coello, is represented here by a por- 
trait of “Rudulph II.” 

Ribera’s “St. Paul” shows him able to achieve a 
monumental design and fine modeling. His good 
draughtsmanship and vigor of handling give the 
work great impressiveness. This artist’s work and 
life belong to Italy, at least’ to Naples and Rome, 
rather than Spain, which accounts for the character 
of much of his work, particularly its sculpturesque 
quality. In an occasional gleam of emotional in- 
tensity, he reveals his Spanish origin. It was due to 
Ribera that the work of the later Italians, especially 
Carvaggio, became known in Spain. 

Downstairs, aside from his single canvases, there 
is a room devoted to a pageant of the provinces of 
Spain, which Joaquin Sorolla completed shortly be- 
fore his death in 1923. Sorolla, who led the artists 
of Spain out of their dark studios to the light and 
brilliancy of pleim air painting, marks an epoch in 
Spanish art, yet he, himself, did not possess a power 
of rendering values, for all his sun and color, nor 
was he strong in composition. But in such a pageant 
as this array of national costume and customs, he is 


204 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


at his best. This room becomes a procession that 
stretches from the warmth and sun of Andalusia to 
Galicia with its mountain streams and chestnut 
groves, through Navarre and Catalonia, hemmed in 
by the Pyrenees, across the plains and vineyards of — 
Aragon to Valencia, lying on the blue Mediter- 
ranean. It is a vivid pageant full of color and life, 
the proud dignity of the peasant, the picturesque 
costumes of the bullfighters, the mysteriously robed 
monks, who bear a swaying canopy over the saint 
in some street procession, turquoise skies and emer- 
ald seas, buttressed mountains and dusty, white, sun- 
bleached roads, where golden oranges fill panniers 
to bursting; horses, cattle, donkeys, pigs, broad hats 
and swirling capes—these are some of the impres- 
sions of this enormous procession on the walls. 

But it is more than a mere colorful riot of pictur- 
esque costume and décor, it is an open book of the 
real Spain that only the Spaniard knows, where 
every man is a caballero and there is no greater aris- 
tocrat than the peasant. Although Spain has with- 
stood modern standardization better than most 
countries of Europe, yet there must come changes. 
Indeed, they have come in such centers as Madrid, 
where the desire “to be like other people” brings 
self-consciousness and loss of many charming old 
conventions, so that this preservation of the life, the 
movement, the character of Spain in its true national 
gesture is an achievement to be grateful for. 

The fact that the individual panels have little 
formal composition or bear few of the hall marks 


HISPANIC MUSEUM 205 


of mural decoration proper, perhaps, endues them 
with this tremendous impression of a flowing cur- 
rent of life and color. It might be the provinces of 
Spain passing in review around the walls in a vast 
breath of the open and a stir of air and freshness, for 
there is only one panel depicting an interior scene 
and that is the dance typical of old Spain and pre- 
served in conservative Seville. 

Most of the panels are carried out in a high key, 
with brilliant flashes of color or the radiance of 
white garments that have soaked up the sunlight to 
give it back in a sort of dazzling splendor. There 
are rich greens of foliage, paler green of the sea, 
metallic glitter of water under the grilling sun or the 
sapphire line of its far-away depths against a sky but 
little paler in its vibrant hue. 

The groups of men and beasts, the figures on 
horseback, on foot, in the market, fishing, dancing, 
picnicking or stirring up the fiesta with their drums, 
are animated and vigorous. Sorolla, of course, has 
always painted cattle, either great broad-backed 
creatures of the plains herded by picturesque 
mounted men, oxen which are made to drag up the 
fishing boats, or proud bulls of the ring with their 
brandishing horns and threatening mien. These are 
here, as well as all the other animals that crowd into 
the péle-méle of many panels, painted with veracity 
of observation and a vigorous handling that give 
solidity to their broad heaving backs and their pow- 
erful necks. The whole vision of this world of 
mountains, streets, sea and plains, with its men and 


206 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


women, children and animals, is a naturalistic one, 
where everything seems to be recorded as one might 
put it down in a note-book with no artifice of ar- 
rangement or subtlety of relations. 

The first Sorolla exhibition at the Hispanic Mu- 
seum gave an astonishing sense of the vigor of this 
artist, but this exhibition brings to us a revelation of 
the proud, hardy race in which the artist has sub- 
merged himself to render the message of its innate 
strength of character as well as its inborn love of 
beauty and its emotional fervor. 

A collection of ten santos or paintings, made pre- 
sumably by the Spanish settlers of New Mexico, 
should not be overlooked. They are among the 
most provocative of the museum’s exhibits. They 
are crude paintings of religious subjects executed 
by men who were not artists, or even in any sense 
familiar with the craftsmanship of drawing or paint- 
ing. The need for symbols of their faith in a land 
of ever-present terror and danger was so strong a 
compulsion that it overcame any sense of inade- 
quate technical equipment. The symbolism of the 
church, though crude, is easily understood. Since 
the conquistadores needed moral support as well as 
the arm of force in their projects of conquest and 
adventure they created these religious panels. The 
sadistic note of Spanish religious temperament, in 
which there is a strange ecstatic joy in the anguish of 
the martyr and the sufferings that lead to sainthood, 
is felt here in a sort of ominous undertone. The 
hostile wilderness, hardships and struggles with an 


VALENCIA, JOAQUIN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA 


Hispanic Society of America 


HISPANIC MUSEUM 207 


alien race did not tend to make the Spanish explorer 
and adventurer more gentle. These harsh, uncouth 
emblems symbolize not only the need for spiritual 
background, but something of the men who fash- 
ioned their gods in the likeness of their natures. 


The Barnard Cloisters 


An important collection of Gothic art, “The 
Cloisters,” should not be missed, although it does 
not come under the province of the present art wan- 
derings. This collection of medieval art was gath- 
ered by the sculptor George Grey Barnard, for his 
own enjoyment and for the instruction and delight 
of his students in New York. When he began his 
slow, patient assembling, there was practically no 
chance to see original Romanesque and Gothic sculp- 
ture here. Later, museums began to acquire collec- 
tions of this work. In time the idea of a museum 
to hold a collection representative of European 
sculpture from the twelfth through the fifteenth 
century came to Mr. Barnard. It is difficult to visu- 
alize the perseverance and courage that made such a 
collection by one man possible. It is now the prop- 
erty of the Metropolitan Museum, through a gift 
of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. It is not a museum in 
the ordinary sense, but a real shrine of medieval art 
formed by a collection numbering about seven hun- 
dred examples, mostly French in origin and of the 
Romanesque and Gothic periods. A small building 
housing some of the treasures is set in wide grounds 


208 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


in which flagged walks and sculptured columns give 
a sense of casual informality and restful charm. An 
air of seclusion and tranquillity pervades the place. 
In the turbulent, seething life of the city it seems 
impossible that there should be such a shelter from 
all-pervading noise and movement, such an oasis 
from the unloveliness of apartment houses and 
monotonous streets. 


CHAPTER THIRTEEN 


BROOKLYN MUSEUM 


INCE the subway dips obligingly under the 
river, the Brooklyn Museum is not difficult of 
access for anyone. As in the case of the Metropolitan 
Museum, it is impossible to visit all the large col- 
lections, now so well arranged in the greater space 
afforded through the recent opening up of a new 
wing, since this vagrant pilgrimage is to paintings 
only. 

The Brooklyn Museum was the first institution to 
recognize the value of water-color as a medium and 
to buy water-colors, so that it was the first to acquire 
examples of the work of Winslow Homer and Sar- 
gent. In connection with these two superb groups, 
there is a collection of later water-colors by con- 
temporary men. The water-colors by Homer rep- 
resent the maturity of his genius. They began to be 
produced quite early in the period of his visit to 
Newcastle-on-Tyne in the eighties, but the important 
works here were carried out much later principally 
in trips to Bermuda and the Bahamas. In “Two 
Flamingoes,” “The Turtle Pond,” “Coming Storm” 
or “Florida Jungle” you can appreciate how this 
swift, spontaneous work is the harmonious balance of 
the thing to be said with the means of saying it. 

209 


210 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


The elusive magic of the color is due in a large meas- 
ure to the white paper that lies under these thin 
washes or gleams through irregularly when they are 
broken, giving brilliancy to the whole picture. The 
menace of the “Coming Storm” blotting out the 
world with its inky rain cloud splashed over the 
heavens; the doe drinking fearfully in the forest 
pool with its lily pads and depths of green shadows; 
the sapphire and emerald seas of the tropics; the 
pale pink flamingoes against gray-green depths of 
moss-hung oaks with a pool catching a ray of light 
like a jewel in sunlight—all these and kindred 
themes affirm the sensitized vision, the facility of 
draughtsmanship and the gift of color that could 
take account of personal reactions to nature with a 
direct simplicity of handling and nobility of concep- 
tion that make this group difficult to leave. 

The numerous water-colors by Sargent show how 
intently he concentrated on the essentials of the sub- 
ject before him, striving in rapid execution and a 
sort of dazzling virtuosity of performance to snatch 
out its very substance. It is not difficult to realize 
what a relief it was to a portrait painter of rather 
ceremonious sitters, to turn to this medium where 
spontaneity and rapidity were prime virtues. There 
is a wide range of performance along the three walls 
that display his work. The figure painting “In 
Switzerland,” with its remarkable foreshortening, 
the architectural precision and rather conventional 
handling of “Santa Maria della Salute,” the lace 
web of spars and masts in “Rigging” against the 


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THE SHELL HEAPS, FLORIDA. WINSLOW HOMER 


Brooklyn Museum 


BROOKLYN MUSEUM 211 


_ domes and minarets of a city, the rose and turquoise 


of “Hills of Galilee,” the colorful “Melon Boats” 
radiating out towards the spectator, “White Ships” 
with the lapping reflections of harbor color pattern- 
ing their hulls, are some of this large collection. A 
specially fluent fusing of color is in “Mountain Fire” 
where, under twirling clouds of blue smoke of vary- 
ing density and differing depths of grayish blue, 
pierced only by a few licking flames, the great mass 
of the mountain is dimly apprehended. 

In the next gallery later water-colors are ar- 
ranged. Here one is impressed, perhaps, with an 
attitude toward the medium that marks its use by 
recent practitioners. It is a clear realization of 
both the limitations and the possibilities of water- 
color, however separated are the points of view or 
technique. Water-color is not made to do duty 
as a sort of inferior oil painting as it has so fre- 
quently been forced to; it becomes the swift con- 
centrated means of a particular form of artistic crea- 
tion that takes its place quite seriously and unaffect- 
edly beside any other. One feels that this group of 
younger artists have in common a reliance on clear 
washes in building up form rather than dependence 
on line, as well as an elimination of non-essentials in 
their concentration on the end in view. The blank 
white spaces of paper emerging from broken washes, 
as in the work of Homer, are also made to count in 
much of the work. Another interesting feature is 
the disregard for naturalistic appearances and a sub- 
jective emphasis. 


212 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


In the very first gallery some paintings by F. 
Hopkinson Smith in gouache seem heavy in their 
body color in contrast to the sparkling “Spanish 
Market” by Robert Blum or the crisp, sharp con- 
tours of “Fuji” by Dudley Mygatt, a young artist 
who did not live to fulfil his promise. Childe Has- 
sam’s brilliant sea and sky and rose-colored cliffs in 
“The Gorge” or Arthur B. Davies’s fluent, but 
opaque color on rough absorbent paper in “Quai 
d’Orléans” are both impressionistic, but far sepa- 
rated in technique or effect. Owen Merton’s “Ber- 
muda” color planes in good design, or Carl Broem- 
mel’s “Royal Palms” with its swish of leaves and 
swirl of air, the crisp, brilliant “Ramapo Hills” by 
Gifford Beal, with the drip and despondency of 
Charles Burchfield’s “February Thaw,” indicate how 
much many of these artists depend for their scheme 
of coloration on the particular subject, and on their 
personal conception of its pictorial character. Else 


the numerous paintable subjects that make appeal to © 


many of these painters would be monotonous instead 
of surprisingly fresh and stimulating. 

Herman Palmer’s “Leopards” is beautiful decora- 
tion, but it is also the essential bodily gesture of these 
lithe, powerful creatures so indolent and graceful in 
their insolent power. Preston Dickenson’s “Street in 
Quebec,” an extended vista of roofs and buildings 
and plunging white, steep street, Bradley Tomlin’s 
“Doorway at Vizelle,” and Stan Wood’s “Cypress” 
with its writhing roots and strange suggestion of im- 
mense vitality and age, are highly personal expres- 


Sen a ee eT 


BROOKLYN MUSEUM 213 


sions, each tinged by individual qualities of vision 
and creative expression. 

Edward Hopper’s strange Victorian survival of a 
house with mansard roof and a gleaming spotless- 
ness of paint and neatness is also endowed with 
beauty in its pattern of light and a sense of human 
habitation which flows in and out of this primness. 
Winthrop Turney makes a ravishing color scheme 
of a bottle standing on a table with light filtering 
through its pink glass surfaces. Robert Hallowell’s 
“Afternoon Lights, Collioure” with its suffusion of 
light and serenity and Hayley Lever’s “English 
Farmhouse” sheltered under its spreading tree are 
more than picturesque records of pleasing impres- 
sions; they have something of the artist’s own reac- 
tion to this wealth of color and line, of old-world 
charm of long habit that molds places with an in- 
effaceable stamp. 

George O. Hart’s “Old French Market” with its 
massive figures and racy notion of life, in exquisite 
nuances of tone, Sandor Bernath’s “Surf,” Lars 
Hoftrup’s “The Glen,’ Herbert Tschudy’s bril- 
liant color in “Sunlight Mesa”—all are widely 
varied, yet they indicate the modern freedom of in- 
dividual technique suited to the subject matter and 
the desire to create design by a few simple, factual 
statements that shall reveal the essentials of the 
scene as well as that permanent quality in the rela- 
tion of man to nature, or to life itself, that does not 
change, however much its outward manifestation 
may vary. 


214. NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


Moreover, because water-color permits of such 
swift spontaneous work, there is in much of the work 
here, hardly more than a sketch of a passing mood of 
nature, so slight, so tremulous that only the highly 
sensitized vision will perceive its exquisite charm, as 
only intelligent, ordered control will give any meas- 
ure of its significance. This intimate, personal qual- 
ity of the medium endows it with a lyrical character 
that is inescapable. There are many other paintings 
that the visitor will enjoy—the flower pieces by 
Isabel Whitney; Charles Demuth’s exquisite color 
and beauty of surfaces in “Peaches”; a curious black 
outlined painting with pale washes over its decisive 
contours, by Walt Kuhn; a group of works by Paul 
Daughtery; Emerson Heitland’s decorative “Jun- 
gle” with its stark palm tree. The choice of subject 
alone must be noted, for many persons still consider 
that there is something sweet and delicate about an 
aquarelle, although the power and vigor of the mar- 
velous water-colors by Homer may have dispelled 
this idea. The range of subject matter is wide, rather 
unpromising often, but always something that has in 
its line or color or its interesting relation of planes 
stimulated the artist’s esthetic emotion. This variety 
of themes makes impression and demonstrates how 
the artist seeks composition and color adequate for 
this stimulus regardless of any supposed lack of 
charm. Whether the work sometimes lapses in exe- 
cution, as it undoubtedly does, at least, it is candid 
and direct and for that reason makes appeal. 

In an adjoining gallery there is a grouping of con- 


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BROOKLYN MUSEUM 215 


temporary American works and American paintings 
of an earlier day. It is difficult to be properly spe- 
cific in this museum, for no catalogue was available 
when visiting it and none has been compiled since 
1904, although one is in process of compilation; so 
the visitor must be his own cicerone to a great extent. 
There is much to repay him. Another regrettable 
fact is that some of the main galleries, containing 
fine primitives, some excellent French and English 
paintings and other worth-while works, are fre- 
quently used for temporary exhibitions, so that to 
refer the sightseer to definite works which might 
or might not be visible on the occasion of his advent 
seems rather hazardous. 

The galleries near the water-color rooms hold, 
it would appear, a permanent group of paintings. 
Many of these works are by contemporary men, 
many of them quite young and coming, to be sure, 
but happily not arrived. This policy of considering 
art as something living and functioning, rather than 
dead and to be preserved, and to be encouraged in 
the lifetime of the artist, is a particular feature of 
the museum and its director, Mr. William Fox. To 
this enlightened point of view is due much of the 
stimulus of the water-color collection and these 
paintings. 

Rockwell Kent’s “Down to the Sea,” with its 
silhouetted pattern of figures against a tremendous 
austerity of sea and sky, indicates how this artist avails 
himself of his individual resources of technique to 
interpret his dramatic conceptions. John Sloan’s 


216 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


“Flaymarket” has a reticence and authority lacking 
in much of his recent work. Van Deering Perrine’s 
“Road to the River” is the work of an artist who 
feels light as a source of energy and seeks to depict 
this quality in his productions. Technically he falls 
behind his conceptions, but there is interest and 
stimulus in these high-keyed works swept with light 
in their piled-up pigment. In the figures of chil- 
dren, such as this, the artist is particularly successful. 

Another contemporary artist who applies paint 
with a knife and fairly carves out his landscapes is 
Birger Sandzen, a Western painter. Mr. Sandzen, 
however, has arrived quite logically at his particular 
procedure; it suits his themes and is a felicitous, per- 
sonal expression. ‘Creek at Moonrise” is carried 
out in so individual an idiom that its exact content 
could be conveyed in no other way. “Sand Cart,” 
by George Bellows, indicates with its struggling 
horses and vigorous men the interest of the painter 
in contemporary scenes and in bulk and brawn and 
_ muscular exertion. It also reveals his intense inter- 
est in theoretic procedure that brought scientific 
check to first impulse. 

John R. Frazier, a young artist, is represented by 
a figure canvas, “Foot Bath,” that takes its place 
quite creditably with accepted work of better-known 
men. The indication of suspended pose in the figure 
is admirably suggested. Allen Tucker’s landscape, - 
“Intervale,” is the work of an original and highly 
gifted artist, who has found the symbols he needs 
to interpret his zsthetic reactions. His highly sensi- 


BROOKLYN MUSEUM 217 


tized vision is expressed in a logic of design that 
makes his work convincing. But with this power to 
choose the elements of natural form needed for 
arbitrary design, there is richness of rhythm and 
color that endow his work with vitality. 

Walter Griffin’s “Old House in Brittany” has its 
swept-up pigment, rich and resonant in color re- 
solved into a chromatic orchestration of great har- 
mony. Gifford Beal’s “Fisherman” is in a different 
vein from his canvases observed in the Metropolitan ' 
Museum, where beautiful filling of space and gay 
color produced decorative work. Here is the Amer- 
ican tradition of both realism and romance in his 
“Fisherman.” The light in its seductive pattern and 
the color lend the romance to the sturdy figure. 
The canvas might be still more effective with a touch 
of sobriety. Robert Spencer’s “White Tenements” 
is the work of a poetic painter, who builds dream 
houses, yet endows them with a curious sense of 
human life and living. The cool serenity of his 
color, the rich textures of the old buildings, the pat- 
tern of mellow light, are all beguiling. 

A group of paintings by Arthur B. Davies shows 
him also a poet and dreamer, as well as a restless 
experimenter with many forms and techniques. His 
esthetic caprices still find him subjectively the same 
whether he uses medieval or classic themes, the 
palette of Venetian painters or the cool, impalpable 
tones of his pastels and water-colors. It is always 
a modern looking out a little curiously and yearn- 
ingly at past life and art and expressing his own 


218 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


reaction to them. Both rhythm and color are modu- 
lated to suit the mood of the particular moment so 


that there is great variety and interest in his work. 


Among the older men whose work we find here, 
the group by Ryder reveals more of his artistic ap- 
proach than single canvases can do. Ryder is often 
compared to Blake because each was a mystic 
wrapped in contemplation of hidden things. But 
here one may easily realize how far removed was 
this American mystic, who transformed the objective 
world around him through the power of his sub- 
jective vision, from the English artist who fled the 
actual world and found in Hebrew mythology the 
symbols that fitly expressed his awesome imaginings. 
The serenity and golden color of some of these 
small pastoral canvases contrasted with the sinister 
skies and menacing waves of his strange sea scenes 
also indicate clearly how much color and treatment 
were conditioned with Ryder by his theme. There 
is something simple in his magic, a strain of home- 
liness in his fantasy that forms an unusual combina- 
tion. Robert L. Newman, another mystic and poet, 
is well represented here in his two canvases, “Ma- 
donna” and “Christ Walking upon the Water,” 
in which the deep spiritual content of the works, the 
gem-like brilliancy of color and the poignancy of his 
personal attitude of mystic and dreamer all make 
deep impression. 

We must likewise note Twachtman’s beautiful 
tapestry of “Meadow Flowers”; Weir’s “Union 
Square”—in reality a part of a larger composition, 


BROOKLYN MUSEUM 219 


but fully illustrating his characteristic painting of 
women with a sort of exquisite homage tacitly con- 
veyed; two canvases by Theodore Robinson, plein 
gir paintings pleasingly mingling impressionism with 
a robust realism in beautiful patterns of light and 
color. Thomas Dewing’s canvas, with its figure in 
a yellow dress, is suffused with a golden radiance. 
It has an exquisite reticence and fragility that be- 
long to his best work and give it a peculiar dis- 
tinction. Thomas Eakins’s “Lady with a Fan” 
seems to dominate the gallery in which it hangs. 
Having given so much consideration to this artist 
in an earlier chapter, it is hardly possible to add any- 
thing. But it is difficult to pass casually this superb 
portrait so thoroughly individual and original in its 
approach and execution. “Springtime,” by Blake- 
lock, so free from enameled surfaces and dark brown 
shadows, attracts one immediately. The filigree of 
foliage is not chiseled out on layers of pigment and 
varnished again and again; rather it is delicate and 
vital and the whole canvas seems alive and warm. 

This informal survey should not content the ad- 
venturer who has reached this museum, but its larger 
galleries of paintings should be seen, if they are 
available at the time of arrival, for they contain 
some important canvases of different schools, both 
foreign and American, that will nicely supplement 
the work already viewed. 


CHAPTER FOURTEEN 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 
The New York Public Library 


N the picture galleries of the New York Public 
Library, at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second 
Street, there is a large permanent group of paint- 
ings including contributions from different sources, 
as well as the collections from the Astor, Lenox and 
Tilden Foundations. Also, changing print exhibi- 
tions of great interest are arranged from time to time 
by Mr. Frank Weitenkampf, Director of the de- 
partment of prints. 

In the first gallery we come upon <Conopeas Ecu- 
ador,” by F. E. Church, the disciple of Thomas 
Cole, who outstripped bi master in execution and 
even in grandeur at times, although he did not inter- 
twine art and allegory for moral instruction. This 
canvas is a typical one in its panoramic view of 
the volcano and of the surrounding country in all 
its lushness of exotic foliage and brilliant hues, 
with the lurid color of sunset and glowing sky to 
enhance this magnificence of nature. It is remark- 
able how it all comes off, all the splendid, incredible 
detail in its luxuriant pageantry so that for all its 


elaboration it gives a convincing idea of a tropical 
220 | 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 221 


country. Nothing was too colossal, too spectacular, 
too remote for this painter; he did not perhaps reach 
from “Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral 
strand” in his artistic peregrinations, but tropic 
jungles, arctic wastes, volcanoes, rainbows, snow-clad 
mountains or any brash exuberance of natural per- 
formance found him undaunted and ready to tran- 
scribe it all on a large canvas with skilful handling 
of intricacies of detail. 

Many of the canvases in this room indicate the 
fashion of the day in collecting when the anecdotal 
painting was in full swing and such a subject as 
“Blind Milton Dictating ‘Paradise Lost’ to His 
Daughters,” by Munkagsy, or almost the whole list- 
ing of the Stuart Gallery attests the delight in the 
story-telling picture, so much out of present vogue. 
“A Woody Landscape, with Mountains in the Dis- 
tance,” by the Scotch painter, Peter Nasmyth, whose 
work may be noted in the Hearn collection of early 
paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, is not so 
formidable as it sounds. It is in the grand manner, 
but with this conventional attitude towards nature 
there is a warmth and directness as well as charm of 
color. A “Marine View,” by George Morland, in its 
deep blue of sea against a great pale sky, has beauty 
of color and lively movement in its figures of smug- 
glers and pursuers. His other canvas here, “Pigs in 
a Fodder Yard,” is a typical subject and in his char- 
acteristic manner he has endowed it with good mod- 
eling and delicate color in beautiful harmony of 
tones, 


222 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


The “Portrait of Miss Kitty Fisher with Doves,” 
by Sir Joshua Reynolds, is a charming informal por- 
trait in decorative arrangement, much more con- 
vincing than the elaborate “Mrs. Billington, as Saint 
Cecilia” also by Sir Joshua, which in character re- 
sembles the young ladies of Seville as Zurbaran 
made them into elegant, modish saints. The “Boy 
in Red Velvet Dress,” again by Reynolds, is more 
like a sketch than the finished manner of the artist, 
and has more force and vigor than much of his 
work. A landscape by Gainsborough, sloping wood- 
land with horses crossing a pool of water, a rustling, 
wood shot with sun and shadow, is said to have been 
in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

A portrait of “Fitz-Greene Halleck,” by Samuel 
F. B. Morse is as romantic as the author of “The 
Culprit Fay” should be. The portrait head of 
“T_afayette,” by Morse, is a vigorous, broadly han- 
dled work, perhaps made as a preliminary study for 
the standing portrait, now in the City Hall collection. 

Constable’s “Valley Farm” is a small canvas but 
full of the scent and freshness of the country this 
painter knew and loved. The two canvases by Tur- 
ner, “English Ship of War Stranded” and “Staffa, 
Fingal’s Cave,” give us land and sea dissolved in 
diaphanous veils of mist shot with color. Forms and 
contours disappear in this iridescence of light and 
hue. 

Two portraits by Raeburn have spontaneity and 
bold, vigorous brushwork with delicate balance of 
light and dark masses. They are widely different in 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 223 


treatment as the individual character of each sitter is 
apprehended and the suitable gesture, color scheme 
and handling developed. One is “Lady Belhaven,” 
in which the diaphanous white draperies with their 
soft clinging folds are a foil for the warm flesh 
tones; the other, “Van Brugh Livingston,” is 
broadly brushed in but with a sympathy and under- 
standing of the poetic, aristocratic type of man he 
depicted. A sketch, “Head of Mrs. Robert Mor- 
ris,” by Gilbert Stuart is so spirited and graceful that 
it is a great relief to come upon it after so many por- 
traits (mostly copies of Washington), have rather 
dulled our interest in this painter. There are por- 
traits of Washington here, by Stuart, one by James 
Peale and a copy of one of Stuart’s portraits of 
Washington by Rembrandt Peale. 

In the Stuart Room there are a large number 
of Hudson River school canvases, and a still greater 
number of anecdotal subjects, whose titles will sug- 
gest their character: “Trying on the Bracelet,” “Set- 
ting the Clock,” “The Pet Lamb,” “The Jealous 
Lover”—are random selections. The big canvas by 
Bierstadt, “Indian Encampment,” is the work of a 
painter who was born in Germany and came to this 
country while a child. He returned to Diisseldorf 
and became thoroughly inoculated with the metic- 
ulous, mechanically letter-perfect realism of that 
school. His tremendous canvases of the Yosemite 
and the Rockies were extremely popular, although 
they were devoid of any sincerity in their actual 
rendering of nature, suggesting quite other charac- 


224 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


teristics of landscape than the ones they so flam- 
boyantly attempted to portray. They were showy, 
superficial and monotonous, lacking penetration or 
real sympathy with the scenes he chose to represent 
on so large a scale. Fortunately he did not have 
any apparent influence on other artists. A different 
epoch was maturing in which his work appeared life- 
less and monotonous. 


New York Historical Society 


The galleries of the New York Historical Society 
contain so many interesting chapters of early Amer- 
ican art and history that it is unfortunate that the 
present quarters necessitate such crowding of the 
collections that it is difficult to appreciate them. 
When larger space permits a new arrangement of 
these works so that less serried ranks of canvases tier 
on tier present themselves to a bewildered view, the 
galleries will yield greater enjoyment. Yet even 
now there is much to reward one who has a little 
perseverance and a sincere interest in Americana. 

In the gallery on the right of the main hall water- 
colors, drawings, prints and paintings of early New 
York form a fascinating record of a city that is so 
metamorphosed every few years that it is necessary 
to have some veridical evidence of its appearance 
before each new transformation. It is almost in- 
credible that these pleasant shady streets with their 
reminiscences of old-world architecture, both Dutch 
and English, and their spacious homes were the back- 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 225 


ground for our noisy, feverish activity of to-day 
with its scant spaces to live or breathe in. It is diff- 
cult for us of this heterogeneous, muddled moment 
to believe that only a finger’s touch away lay this 
serenity of living and gracious continuity of tradi- 
tion. 

Scattered through the corridors and in the gallery 
at the left are the portraits of prominent figures of 
the early generations of New York’s history by 
artists contemporary with them. It is one of the 
surprises, perhaps, that Asher B. Durand, whom we 
know as the actual founder of the American land- 
scape school, is here represented by a large group of 
portraits; but Durand, like all painters of his day, 
found it necessary to turn to portraiture for substan- 
tial returns. Moreover, this artist was an engraver 
and accustomed to painstaking portraiture before he 
turned painter. He was commissioned by Luman 
Reed to make portraits of General Jackson and 
Henry Clay, then in Washington, and later to make 
heads of all the Presidents, original portraits when 
possible, or copies of Stuart’s well-known works. 
This Mr. Luman Reed is the New York merchant 
whose collection forms the nucleus of the Americana 
here. He exhibited his paintings in a private gallery 
of his own home on lower Broadway. After his 
death the collection was purchased by friends and 
later with other works formed the New York Gal- 
lery of Fine Arts. Eighty of these paintings are 
now in the possession of the Historical Society, pre- 
sented to it at the closing of the New York Galleries 


226 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


of Fine Arts after it had led a precarious existence. 
Many of these commissioned portraits are here, 
mostly copies of Stuart’s work, with the “Andrew 
Jackson” from Durand’s own hand. The self-por- 
trait by Durand is a sensitive, well-executed work and 
interesting to compare with the one of the artist by 
Trumbull, also a fine portrait, and one by Jewett. 
The collection gives full opportunity to study the 
work of Trumbull, the Peales, and a large group of 
later painters, such as Samuel F. B. Morse, Waldo, 
Vanderlyn, Huntington and C. C. Ingham. There 
is, moreover, a delightful fringe of early paintings, 
anonymous in many cases, with strong Dutch and 
English influences, portraying the early village fa- 
thers and their families in fascinating directness and 
spirited execution. Such a one is the portrait of 
“Colonel Tiebout,”? whose mansion used to stand at 
the present site of Eighteenth Street and Fifth 
Avenue, while his acres reached far back into rural 
seclusion. He is a fine upstanding, portly gentle- 
man who looks as though he might withstand any in- 
fringements of his prerogatives with both force and 
equanimity. “Mrs. Nathaniel Griffith” is another 
delightful painting—her fresh, girlish face against 
a pale green background with a luminous clearness 
to set off the flesh tints, as well as the textures of the 
high waisted dress. Since neither of these portraits 
is in the catalogue, compiled some twenty years ago, 
they cannot be referred to by listing, but they will 
not be missed in even a casual survey. “Captain 
David Abeel,” another fine portrait, is a tremendous 


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VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 227 


personage, with red waistcoat and tie against a deep 
green sky and sea where a full-rigged ship is run- 
ning before the wind. It is a vivacious, lively pre- 
sentment, much in the modern expressionistic manner 
of symbolism in the background to indicate the psy- 
chological index of character. It would seem that 
such men do not live nowadays, that they get ironed 
out and squared off in the tremendous amount of 
unavoidable contacts of modern living. It also 
seems that the lack of such personality is a great loss 
to our standarized types of society. Another vivid | 
personality directly portrayed is Cornelius Steen- 
wyck, prominent in early annals of New York. 
Then there is the De Peyster group—from the 
beautiful portraits of “John de Peyster” and “Mrs. 
John de Peyster” by Charles Willson Peale or the 
early portraits of members of the family painted in 
Flanders and brought over to this country to the 
later portraits which come down well into the nine- 
teenth century—including many other New York 
alliances and well-known families in the single be- 
quest of Catherine Augusta de Peyster, two decades 
ago. The Stuyvesant family from doughty Pieter 
down, or the Schuylers, or other well-known names 
in the early annals of New York, present interesting 
study and fill out definite outlines. There are others 
equally interesting, such as “Rip Van Dam” and 
“Mrs. Rip Van Dam,” rather mythical personages 
of our city’s founding and history about whom we 
know little. There are also copies of old-world 
paintings of explorers who adventured to these 


228 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


shores—John Cabot, Hernando Cortes, Americus 


Vespucius and Columbus—as well as paintings of 
America’s really first families who were found here 
on the landing of the white man, such as the portrait 
of “Sa-go-ye-wat-ha, or Red Jacket,” an imposing 
brave in full regalia. 

There are twelve canvases by John Trumbull, 
valuable historical documents as well as the work of 
an artist of decided attainments. His career was 
curiously checkered, the Revolution interfering with 
his work and even bringing him a period of impris- 
onment in London. Later he served for a time as 
secretary for John Jay. Trumbull conceived the 
project of executing a number of paintings of Amer- 
ican historical subjects in the grand manner of the 
day, and for this purpose made a study of many 
heads from life for the principal figures, studies 
which to-day have great value as authentic portraits 
of historic personages. 

Both Charles Willson and Rembrandt Peale are 
well represented here. A portrait of C. W. Peale 
by Benjamin West seems endowed with more vital- 
ity and interest than most of West’s portraits. It is 
graceful and fluent, the presentation of a handsome 
man of poetic mien holding his brush suspended in 
his upraised hand. An extremely interesting family 
group by C. W. Peale includes his brother, James 
Peale, who painted miniatures and portraits in oils, 
and his sons, Rembrandt and Titian. Rembrandt, 
Rubens, Angelica Kauffmann, Raphael, Titian, were 
names chosen for his children in the hope of set- 


OSE ae 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 229 


tling the divine afflatus upon them, but it was not a 
very successful inoculation, although two of them 
were artists of some merit. 

C. W. Peale was one of West’s pupils, and, if not 
highly endowed, had a natural flair for portraiture. 
His early portraits were stiff and a little cold fol- 
lowing the manner rather than the spirit of Copley. 
In this early portrait of Washington he is accused of 
giving the Father of his Country “pig eyes,” because 
his drawing was faulty and uncertain. Under 
West’s tuition he gained technically so that his later 
draughtsmanship is sure and able, although his 
painting, like his master’s, is often thin. Peale’s life 
contains an astonishing record of performance—he 
was variously a clockmaker, a coachmaker, a silver- 
smith, a lecturer, the founder of a museum where 
the bones of a mastodon and many curiosities were 
displayed. 

“The Artist Showing His First Picture to His 
Parents,” by William Dunlap, is the work of an 
artist attracted to study with West, whose position 
and reputation in London proved a lodestone for 
American artists. Moreover, West was exceedingly 
kind to his aspiring young countrymen and his coun- 
sel, both artistic and practical, was given them freely. 
Gallery 16 of the Metropolitan Museum contains a 
painting by Matthew Pratt, the first of these pupils; 
it is called “The American School” and represents a 
group of American pupils in West’s studio. Dun- 
lap was not an artist to be taken very seriously, but 
he proved to be an eminent biographer, and his ac- 


230 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


count of his contemporaries, colleagues and friends 


in the early period of American art is the source of 


most of our information about these men. Consid- 
ering the close range from which he viewed these 
now historic figures—West, Stuart, and a host of 
others—and the obligation he felt to dwell on moral 
as well as artistic endowments, his work is really a 
remarkable feat and is less a “History of the Arts 
of Design in America” than a detailed account of the 
life and work of its early artists. - 


Gilbert Stuart is perhaps better known to the | 


average American than any of these other names. 
His early career was checkered enough to account 
for any little eccentricities of temper which im- 
pressed his later sitters and companions. After four 
years under West, in which he acted not only as 
pupil but as helper, he set up as a portrait painter 


on his own and was eminently successful. He lived 


in great state and extravagance, finally coming to this 


country to paint the portrait of Washington; he 


made two from life and produced innumerable 
replicas of these original portraits, obviously re- 
peating the profile portrait of the first sitting which 
he said he destroyed. His work is too well known 
to need comment. 


John Vanderlyn is another artist well represented 


here. The portrait of “Aaron Burr” serves as a re- 
minder of Burr’s patronage of the young artist 
whom he sent to study with Stuart in Philadelphia 
and later commissioned to paint his own portrait and 


that of his daughter, Theodosia. Vanderlyn also 


eae ee, SO Oem 


PORTRAIT OF CHARLES W. PEALE... BENJAMIN WEST 


New York Historical Societ’ 


ee 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 231 


studied in Paris and Rome—the influence of his 
Italian sojourn is shown here in his copy of Car- 
racci’s “Bacchante and Satyr.” The portrait of 
“Robert R. Livingston,” made in Paris, is the most 
interesting of Vanderlyn’s works in these galleries. 
He was a friend and companion of Washington 
Allston and of famous writers and artists gathered in 
Rome. It is interesting to note that he was the first 
American painter to be drawn to Paris to study. 
In much of his work in portraiture he reflects the 
influence of David, the French painter. 

John Wesley Jarvis is represented by a large 
group of portraits indicating his immense labor and 
perseverance. He not only painted in New York, 
Philadelphia and Baltimore, but for a period of 
years made trips to the South each winter, where by 
unflageing industry he amassed considerable sums. 
At one time he had made money from cutting sil- 
houettes, later from little heads painted on card- 
board. He was at one time associated with Sully 
and for many years had Henry Inman as his ap- 
prentice and assistant. After Inman left him to set 
up as a portrait painter, Jarvis continued his prodi- 
gies of work until his death in the early fifties. He 
was the first American painter of any note not edu- 
cated in foreign studios; he picked up his technique 
from many sources, particularly from an engraver. 
He was English by birth, a nephew of John Wesley, 
the great Methodist divine. 

Inman has several canvases here, the most inter- 
esting that of the poet “Fitz-Greene Halleck.” The 


232 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


artist had a pedestrian talent, fidelity to realistic de- 
tail being apparent in his work. He also produced 
landscape, miniatures and figure paintings. 

George P. A. Healy, of a later generation which 
was moving further from the traditions of the 
English school of portraiture, is well represented 
here by his portrait of “Daniel Webster”; this shows 
Webster as a young man and indicates the artist’s 


good drawing, warmth of color and power to seize 


essential characteristics—in his best work. He was 
more of a cosmopolitan than the earlier men, resid- 
ing in Paris, Rome, New York and Chicago. His 
large canvas of “Webster Replying to Hayne” in 
Faneuil Hall, Boston, is probably his best known 
work. He painted two other enormous compositions 
with historical themes, and an incredible number 
of portraits. The work of two contemporaries, 
Daniel Huntington and Charles Elliott, may also 
be seen here. They, too, were men of prodigious 
activity and turned out portraits with a prolificness 
that is astonishing to contemplate. We may be more 
fevered in our material pursuits to-day, but surely 
no present artist could keep up to the output of these 
worthies. Huntington, moreover, painted figure 
pieces, allegorical subjects so congenial to his day, 
such as “The Sibyl” shown here, and groups of char- 
acters from Washington Irving’s works. His por- 


trait of the “Earl of Carlisle” is characteristic of his — 


suave, gracious manner and his social background. 
William Mount’s “Truant Gamblers” and “Bar- 
gaining for a Horse” are the work of an artist whose 


ee ee ee ee aN aheiaics 


ery 


preety 


ee a a ee ee en ee ee 


So 


Pp ee 


Pe a ee ee ae 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 233 


choice of genre subjects coincided with the taste of 
his day. Like many another early American artist, 
he started to paint signs. Later he began to paint 
the figures and scenes of rural Long Island where 
he made his home and succeeded in portraying vig- 
orous types with a sympathy and understanding 
that give interest to his work still, however far it 
may be from present-day esthetics, particularly in 
its monotonous color. His work is above the general 
level of anecdotal canvases of his day, realistic, 
lively and well executed. 

Charles Ingham, a native of Dublin, though of 
English ancestry, came to this country when twenty 
years old, apparently fully equipped as a portrait 
painter and immediately found a clientele and suc- 
cess until his death nearly fifty years later. The 
group of his portraits here includes the interesting 
head of “Lafayette” painted from life, from which 
was made later the full-length portrait, now in the 
State Department, Albany. The rich glazes and 
brilliancy of coloring in this work show the artist 
quite removed in technical training from his fellow 
artists in this country. In the Metropolitan Mu- 
seum, Wing J, Gallery 9 A, “Flower Girl’ illus- 
trates his delight in meticulous, highly finished de- 
tail. The posies in the basket are almost as perfect 
in their verisimilitude as are the old wax flowers pre- 
served under glass cases in Victorian interiors. 

A group of paintings, a series representing the 
“Course of Empire,” by Thomas Cole deserves 
notice. They represent so thoroughly the taste of 


234. NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


his day for moralizing and grandeur of scale. 


These works form a pageant from the “Savage 
State” through the “Arcadian or Pastoral,” the 
“Consummation of Empire,” “Destruction” and 
“Desolation.” ‘They are sheer nonsense as philos- 


ophy or ethics and pretty bad as painting, but Luman - 


Reed is reported to have doubled his original price 
for them. We may consider them a more inter- 
esting commentary on the psychology of their day 
than on its art. Cole’s small canvases hanging 
nearby, “Summer Sunset” and “Autumn Scene,” 
show that the artist had charm, real appreciation of 
natural forms and originality in recording them. 
Even his small canvases of Italian scenes have direct- 
ness and vigor which the ridiculous allegory and 
thin, hard painting of the large works would not 
have suggested. 

The galleries of the Historicil Society contain 
many foreign paintings which were in the collec- 
tions of Thomas J. Bryan, willed to the Society in 
1867, and of Louis Durr, bestowed in 1882. In the 
Bryan collection is a group of early Italian paintings 
forming a remarkable contrast to the type of paint- 
ings collected at that period in America, and bespeak- 
ing for the collector an appreciation of art far ahead 
of his time. Although these rare paintings are unfor- 
tunately huddled into close quarters with indifferent 
copies and negligible works near them, it is im- 
possible not to be deeply impressed by their quality. 
Naturally the early attributions have to be discarded 
to-day. A number of authorities on Italian art, such 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 235 


as Bernhard Berenson, Richard Offner, F. Mason 
Perkins and the English critic Dowdenson, have 
studied the paintings and come to more authorita- 
tive conclusions upon their painters. Equally, of 
course, these later attributions are not always in 
accord, so that one must, perhaps, in the final esti- 
mate make a decision oneself where it is necessary 
to be authoritative. But without attribution or au- 
thority one may enjoy these works and long for a 
better arrangement of them. 

One of the earliest paintings is a triptych (B-2) 
from which all but the underpainting and the in- 
cision of the contours has departed. Yet its exquisite 
carving, its design and its thoroughly sustained con- 
ception still make it an impressive work. It has 
the grace and charm of Sienese paintings. A large 
altar-piece, “Virgin and Child with Four Saints” 
(attributed to Guido of Siena), is one of the most 
compelling paintings in the gallery. It has a fine 
architectural structure, its majestic Virgin rising 
hieratically above the other figures. Her strange 
mood of absorption as she gazes out from her curi- 
ously narrowed eyes, the dignity of the whole con- 
ception, the beauty of the color, the fusing of all the 
figures in a web of even texture, give this painting 
great fascination. Dr. Offner’s attribution to Nardo 
di Cione, brother of Orcagna, whom he assisted in 
the frescoes of the Strozzi chapel in Santa Maria 
Novella, seems a good choice. 

Another smaller “Virgin and Child with Saints” 
(attributed to Cimabue) suggests to the beholder 


\ 


236 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


at all familiar with early Italian painting so many 
possibilities that this rapt, ecstatic Virgin may well 
be the work of one of the Giotteschi, of Bernado 
Daddi, in particular, of Orcagna or even Nardo, 
though the genuine pleasure it gives does not de- 
pend on its authentic label. 

A large desco da parto is similar to the marriage 
salvers we noticed in the Metropolitan Museum. It 
represents “Knights at a Tournament,” and from 
its heraldic insignia—feathers and ribbon with the 
Medicean “Semper,” and the crests of the Medici 
and Tornabuoni families (Lucrezia Tornabuoni 
married Piero de’ Medici) it is generally conceded 
that it is a salver commemorating the birth of Lo- 
renzo the Magnificent, in 1449. It is a curious and 
striking composition, monumental in its structure 
with a winged figure of fame mounted on a globe in 
front of a strange frozen landscape stretching out in 
deep perspective, while horsemen crowd around the 
pedestal of this sphere with uplifted hands of ac- 
claim. The foreground colors are bright pink, green 
and buff in strange contrast with the gray rocks and 
the pale, cold sky. The attributions here are many, 
for there is much to remind us of various artists: 
the scientific delight in problems of perspective, 
the monumental, static character of the concep- 
tion, the delightful animals of the foreground, or 
the squat, flat-backed horses so skilfully radiated 
from the central axis of the composition. Again — 
whether we say Uccello or Piero della Francesca 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 229 


or Pesellino, as differing authorities suggest, it is an 
enchanting work that holds one with its unique con- 
ception as well as with its superb execution. 

Another desco da parto, “Birth of John the Bap- 
tist” (here attributed to Uccello), indicates, accord- 
ing to Dr. Offner, fourteenth-century work in its 
landscape and in the structure of the house and fif- 
teenth in the figures. It probably suggested Uccello 
again in its geometrical intricacies of composition 
with the complications of different levels, the rela- 
tions of arches and rectangles and the perspective 
of landscape all to be accounted for in the octagonal 
outline of the tondo. It may well be a design from 
some now-forgotten work by Uccello carried out by 
a Sienese or Florentine painter. 

A “Last Judgment” (attributed to Simone di 
Memmi) is certainly more Florentine than Sienese 
except perhaps in the figure of the Virgin. It is a 
strange work full of theological implications in 
its symbolism and supporting the figures—blue 
angels, Christ as a threatening judge, the elect, the 
damned, a host of cherubim, the Virgin and St. John, 
in the foreground—with structural soundness and 
sophisticated knowledge. Taddeo Gaddi’s “Cruci- 
fixion” might well be left as attributed, although 
given by Dr. Offner to a Sienese follower of Bartolo 
de Fredi. Another attribution to Memmi, “Virgin 
and Child” (B-6, of the catalogue), seems to be 
generally accorded to Daddi. It has a green under- 
painting with gem-like blues—a gracious and elo- 


238 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


quent conception. B-14, “Crucifixion,” is half of a 
triptych imbued with dramatic intensity and a vivid 
realism of detail. The wings of a Tabernacle at- 
tributed to Lorenzo il Monaco may well keep this 
attribution, for it is medieval in conception rather 
than Renaissance. A “Crucifixion,” curiously at- 
tributed to Botticelli, is one of the most powerful 
of the conceptions of this theme, giving a sense of 
isolation and almost theatric tragedy. The kneeling 
Virgin resembles the Christ closely in features. The 
pattern of light and shadow and brusque oppositions 
of color with the foreshortened horse and grouping 
of figures make this a fascinating study. It would 
be impossible not to think it Florentine, whether 
the actual artist or more than one were specified. A 
Byzantine “Virgin and Child” (B-1), with the typ- 
ical green lights of the underpainting and brilliant 
crimson and gold, suggests the source of so much 
artistic influence that it possesses a special interest in 
its formal, conventional outlines. 

Mantegna’s “Crucifixion” seems universally ac- 
corded him, though considered a studio piece, in 
which the outlines may have been rather perfunc- 
torily filled in. “Adoration of the Infant Christ,” 
attributed to Perugino, but probably by a follower 
of Raphael, is a crowded composition. The figures 
of the Saints, especially Joseph and St. John might 
have come out of Raphael’s canvases. There are 
many other interesting works and many dis- 
tinguished names. So rare an artist to come upon as 


VIRGIN AND CHILD, RECENTLY ATTRIBUTED TO 
NARDO DI CIDNE 


Bryan Collection, New York Historical Society 


sy f 2 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 239 


Giorgione is represented by two canvases, apparently, 
but neither would to-day be attributed to him. 
Many works deny their attributions from their in- 
trinsic character, such as the “‘Crucifixion” attributed 
to Jan Van Eyck, which is not an important work. 
It suggests van der Weyden in the figure of the Vir- 
gin particularly, but is hardly skilful enough for 
even an early work of his. The “Marriage of St. 
Catherine,” attributed to Memling, seems to have 
aroused divided opinions among authorities, none of 
whom believes it to be a Memling, but ascribes it 
variously to Isenbrant, Gerard David, or Bernard 
van Orley, whose Italianate Flemish “Virgin and 
Child and Angels” may be seen in the Altman Col- 
lection of the Metropolitan Museum. 

Most of the Dutch and French paintings suffer so 
much from their present disposition that it is im- 
possible to call attention to them. A “Virgin and 
Child with Cherubs” by Mabuse, “Castle and Sea- 
port” by van Goyen, “Lady Playing with a Dog” by 
Jacob Ochterveldt, marine views by Willem van de 
Velde, are among the few that receive enough light 
to be fairly seen. An interesting “The Three Marys” 
in the Durr Collection (D-158), by some follower 
of Luini is placed so that one may really see it. A 
number of landscapes by Durand in this collection 
indicate the sincerity and directness of his work al- 
though it lacks real composition. Many of the por- 
traits, such as that of “Mrs. Alexander Hamilton,” 
painted from life by Eastman Johnson, are further 


240 NEW YORK’S ART GALLERIES 


valuable documents in American history. When this 
large, miscellaneous collection can have sufficient 
space to be arranged suitably with, one hopes, a little 
separation of goats and sheep in the way of removing 
copies and inferior performances, there will be a 
remarkable group of Americana—portraits, land- 
scapes and views of old New York—and a superb 
collection of Italian primitives as well as fringes of 
less important but interesting works. 


The City Hall 


At the City Hall a group of portraits deserves a 
visit. Among them is the portrait of “Lafayette” by 
Samuel F. B. Morse, which shows how a good artist 
can make us forget the physical handicaps of his 
sitter, for Lafayette was a short, stocky man, not at 
all imposing in appearance. Here the artist presents 
him coming up at the top of a flight of steps on a 
terrace in the foreground against a stretch of city be- 
hind him and a broken, sinister sky. He has a flour- 
ish of gesture without rhetorical emphasis. The 
dark and light masses of his costume, the disposition 
of the light and the interesting composition with the 
balustrades of the terrace, the octagon lozenges of 
the pavement and the deep recession of the back- 
ground make this an animated, arresting portrait. 
“Henry Clay,” by the industrious and versatile Jar- 
vis, has a rather conventional arrangement and in- 
different draughtsmanship, yet the theatrical pose, 


. i a _— Seen 
a ee ae ee ee ee ee 


VARIOUS COLLECTIONS 241 


the placing of the figure by the high columns and 
the real characterization also form an interesting por- 
trait. Charles Elliott’s “Governor Bouck” and 
Trumbull’s fiery presentment of “Governor Clin- 
ton” are other notable works among a large group of 
early statesmen. 


THE ART GALLERIES AND 
THEIR LOCATIONS 


THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, 
Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. 


HISPANIC SOCIETY MUSEUM, 
156th Street, West of Broadway. 


THE CLOISTERS, 
Fort Washington Avenue at 1g1!st Street. 


NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, 
Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. 


NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 
Central Park West and 77th Street. 


CITY HALL, 
City Hall Park, Broadway and Park Row. 


THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM, 
Eastern Parkway and Washington Avenue, Brooklyn. 


